Wireless Broadband

Recently, there has been some press about Verizon’s “3G” Broadband Access service. While ubiquitious wireless data services are an important next step in our country’s data infrastructure, it puzzles me that we are calling this “Broadband”.

Broadband (regardless of the FCC’s official definition), should represent significanly faster bandwidth than standard dialup service. But even this isn’t the whole story. Broadband specifically refers to a connection’s ability to support full motion video and audio at a standard resolution, which a little bit of extra bandwidth to spare. Usually this means a video stream of 320×240.

Macromedia provides a good webpage on some standard video encoding rates.

According to this page, a standard low motion video—320×240 at 30 frames per second—should take up at least 800kbps. There are other calculations that can be made for other video and audio encoders, but they are all in the same ballpark for what you’ll find on the web.

Here’s the thing: Verizon states that the typical speeds for BroadbandAccess are 400-700kbps. This is clearly below what is necessary for standard quarter screen full motion video!

So, when did Broadband become only a few times faster than dialup? I posit that we shouldn’t allow anything below 1mbps upstream AND downstream to be called Broadband. Anything else is false advertising.