AT&T has been doing some testing recently. It bought cable modem service and then tested peak throughput and average throughput.
As you might have guessed, there's a huge difference. But the point is not to show that Digital Subscriber Line access is any better. It is to emphasize the point that access is only part of what determines end user quality of experience.
Every element of the delivery chain has to be optimized or quality of experience will be bounded by the weakest link. In fact, the tests suggest that real-world performance is precisely what users encounter.
Peak advertised speeds are possible at 3 a.m. During the evening hours, when home usage peaks, average throughput routinely drops as low as 300 to 400 kbps.
And that's just the difference between peak and average bandwidth. IP-delivered communications and entertainment also is subject to degradation because of latency and jitter, port contention and any number of other issues. In fact, port contention might in some ways be a bigger problem for mobile providers than raw bandwidth.
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