A couple of weeks back, when I delved into the Cisco sponsored broadband quality study, there were a number of results that startled me. The good thing about the methodology of measuring actual usage is it's a lot closer to real customer experience than any official rating or ranking. The downside is you don't always know how to explain the results.
So one thing that jumped at me was that bandwidth in Romania and Russia were much higher than I would have expected:
Romania
- Download speed: 5349kps
- Upload speed: 1595kps
- Latency:95ms
Russia
- Download speed: 4443kps
- Upload speed: 2648kps
- Latency:151ms
This put Romania at number 11 in the BQS ranking, in front of France, the US, the UK and many other countries that I would have spontaneously thought had better quality broadband service. Russia was also well ranked, though a little lower.
Now in the case of Russia, according to the study results broadband penetration is low (10.5%) and fiber penetration is high (42% of broadband) so assuming these figures are right I'm thinking this has got to be a lot of gated communities, high-end offers. In the case of Romania, where penetration is much higher (31.3%) and fiber much lower (4%), I couldn't figure out an explanation...
Brough Turner's blog has just provided the explanation. It may not account for the whole difference, but it's an important factor. Essentially, Brough relates the story from one of his friends who spent some time in Bucarest where, it seems, people pull fiber strands from their homes to local exchanges by hogging available space on public ducts and poles with (of course) no authorisation to do so.
I'm wondering if these are accounted for in the 4% fiber the study lists. My gut feeling is no, but it's hard to know for sure. If anyone has more information on this and is willing to share, please comment or email me!
If any illustration was needed that the issue really is with the last-mile roll-out and not with demand, we found it there!
