Acceptable DSL Speeds (ms based)

Wed May 4 16:16:45 UTC 2005

I have found that "acceptable speeds" for residential users will vary widely 
from one area of the country to another.  To a large degree it is a perception 
issue rather than an empirical one (ie www.cnn.com loads "too slowly").  The 
best metric for the happiness of a DSL customer base seems to be simply how 
many complaints you get and how many switch to cable modem.  Granted, there are 
always a silent majority who are unhappy and will never let you know until they 
cancel, but the number of complaints you do get can usually be used to 
extrapolate the rest.

That being said, I think it would be a useful thing for a provider to have a 
local way to measure speed from the customer to some relatively close point in 
the network, and then you as a company can evaluate if your upstreams suckiness 
more accurately than a customer could.  I think it would be reasonable to 
expect that a customer should get near line rate across your network and to the 
first hop of your upstream.  After that, it depends on the suckiness factor.

Luke Parrish wrote:
> 
> Does anyone have a good resource for acceptable speeds for home DSL 
> customers?
> 
> I would like to see acceptable speeds from the customer CPE to the first 
> layer 3 hop, the hop to the upstream  and the hop that leaves the 
> upstream network.
> 
> Thanks
> luke
> 
> 
> Luke Parrish
> Centurytel Internet Operations
> 318-330-6661