Broadband Speed: A Battlefield Without Smoke

According to the Internet access price report released by the Open Technology Research Institute of the US Foundation, for the Internet connection service with a monthly fee of US$35-50 (RMB 184-307), the fastest three are Seoul. Hong Kong and Paris. In South Korea, 50Mbps and 100Mbps broadband are the mainstream access speeds, and economically developed cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou have not yet fully popularized 20Mpbs broadband.

Whether it is broadband access rate or broadband fees, the gap between domestic and foreign countries is very large. At the same time, domestic operators continue to launch broadband speed-up campaigns, but netizens feel that the speed of broadband is limited. Thus, each time operators call out broadband, there will be a large number of users complaining that the broadband rate is not up to standard. As broadband speeds up, it has evolved into a war of words without gun smoke.


Broadband speeding tricky

I believe that many senior Internet users have a profound understanding of the changes in broadband access rate. Before and after 98 years, they used 56K telephones to dial-up and then upgraded to ISDN, and then ADSL dominated for 4-5 years. Around 2010, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology proposed the slogan of Guangjin’s retreat of copper, and fiber-optic or LAN-based homes began to be widely promoted, and broadband speeding began.

In fact, in the ADSL era, some areas have started to accelerate. From the earliest 2M rate, mention of 8M or even 20M super ADSL, the scope of application is not wide. Fiber-optic access to home, opened the prelude to broadband speed. As a result, many netizens have complained too much after they speed up. According to the comprehensive reaction of users around the world, there are mainly the following aspects of broadband speed-up tricks.

1, bandwidth vacuity: This is the most common trap in broadband speed, but also the most concentrated point of conflict. Many Internet users have reported that they have applied for 10M broadband, and the download speed is only 800KB. Under normal circumstances, the theoretical download rate for 10M wideband is 1.25M; considering line loss, it is normal as long as it is in the range of 1.15 to 12.2M. Obviously, only 800KB download speed is not normal.

Judging from some complaints in the forum, China Unicom and China Telecom’s broadband virtual counterfeit products are less, and such small operators as Great Wall Broadband and China Railcom have a serious shortage of bandwidth.

2. The price increase is not accelerated: When fiber-to-the-home access has just begun to be promoted, the price increase will be required. As a result, after many netizens speeded up, they found that there was no significant improvement in speed. For example, users originally used 6M ADSL broadband, upgraded to 10M fiber, the speed is similar to 6M. The increase in price is not the fastest, and it is the hardest-hit area for broadband acceleration.

3, after the speed change speed limit: From a technical point of view, the user's network experience depends on the broadband uplink and downlink rates. What we usually call broadband speed refers to the broadband downlink rate. In the era of ADSL, the maximum rate of uplink limitation by technology is only 640K. Super ADSL technology will increase the uplink rate to 1M. If the uplink rate is too small, it will result in no response when the user's Internet access request is too much. After all, the uplink and downlink of ADSL are realized by the same phone line.


After the optical fiber enters the home, many users feel that the network experience is not good, the operator increases the user's downlink rate, limits the user's uplink rate, and causes the Internet access request congestion to fail to respond. It is understood that some 100M broadband users in Shenzhen are stuck in 2M upstream. Unicom broadband subscribers in Shandong, Hebei, and Northeast China, 10M and 20M broadband subscribers, have their uplink rate locked at 1M.

In addition to deliberately limiting the uplink rate, operators in some areas also restrict the speed of BT or Thunder downloads through technical means or professional equipment. Talking about the reason for speed limit, industry insiders who once worked at China Unicom and Telecom stated that the user access rate has increased and the backbone network speed has not been mentioned, resulting in network congestion. Operators can only impose speed limits on users.

To put it plainly, behind the increasing speed of broadband, the backbone network resources of operators cannot meet the needs of Internet users. The speed that operators are advocating is nothing more than a marketing nemesis. Because of this, hundreds of millions of Internet users will have doubts: Why is it so difficult to increase broadband speed?

Where is the speed of broadband acceleration?

In 2013, Broadband China was officially upgraded to a national strategy. As China's largest broadband operator, China Unicom and China Telecom have also been quiet for more than two years before restarting a new round of fiber-optic broadband upgrades. At the end of February this year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced the annual goal of the broadband strategy for 2015: 80 million households will be required to add fiber-to-the-home coverage at the end of 2015; urban broadband will reach 20M, and some large cities will achieve 100M.

After two years of large-scale upgrades, China Unicom and China Telecom's two operators only have the ability to provide 10M bandwidth access, and some regions can provide 20M or 50M broadband access capabilities. Even so, China Telecom and China Unicom can hardly complete the broadband strategic goals set by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.


All along, operators are complaining about the difficulty of speeding up broadband. Specifically, broadband speed is difficult to achieve, mainly reflected in the following aspects:

1, high cost: In the light of the copper back policy, fiber access has become the mainstream. According to relevant sources of China Unicom, the cost per household of fiber-optic households is nearly 10,000 yuan, including the cost of operator-side equipment and communication lines and marketing expenses. A community of 1,000 households has a network construction cost of tens of millions. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology revealed that the investment in optical fiber broadband network construction will exceed 150 billion yuan in the next three years, and the high cost can be imagined.

2. Difficulties in network construction: Behind the speed increase in broadband is technology upgrades. At present, the speed of domestic broadband is upgraded from the telephone line copper cable to optical fiber. This is equivalent to the need to re-lay the lines from the operator's room to the user's cell. Although some regions have already implemented fiber to the village or to the building, they all promote fiber-to-the-home and force the expansion of the line.

In addition, for some mature communities, operators must obtain property consent if they want to transform the network. In some areas, property companies even ask operators for tens or even hundreds of thousands of entrance fees. Otherwise, the property will not allow operators to enter the construction and reconstruction. According to the person in charge of the construction of China Unicom and Telecom, the property has become a roadblock to the network reconstruction.

3, behind the network planning: broadband speed, not the user to the operator side of the speed. After the full implementation of fiber-to-the-home, carriers' regional transmission lines and the transmission lines of each room must be expanded. Previously, equipment in the Copper Age was basically phased out and the broadband metropolitan area network was rebuilt. Severely backward network planning has also hindered the effect of broadband speedup to a certain extent.

In the final analysis, the crux of the difficulty in broadband acceleration is the lack of long-term strategic vision of operators, resulting in network upgrades can only be repeated construction. At present, to complete the goal of popularizing high-speed broadband by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, operators must first increase the rate of user access, and then gradually upgrade the backbone network.

Over the years, broadband access technology has been dominated by developed countries such as Europe and the United States. Operators have no thorough understanding of the prospects for broadband access technology, leading to the lack of continuity in broadband backbone network construction and expansion. Under the requirements of the policy, operators have raised the speed of broadband, which has caused a shortage of backbone network resources. In desperation, it can only restrict the speed of users. This will inevitably cause users to complain about broadband acceleration. Before the construction of the broadband backbone network fails to meet the standards for broadband speed-up operations, the war of words between subscribers and operators triggered by broadband speeding will continue.