| Cablevision, Verizon: A War of Facts, Please |
| Friday, 01 May 2009 15:25 |
 Eric Rabe of Verizon needs to either present some evidence or pull off the Verizon policy blog, "Cablevision is offering very high speed service to a very limited number of customers. It is a parlor trick."  Actually, around the world, services like Cablevision's new "101 megabit" offering generally do consistently hit 80-100 meg on speed tests, and rarely fall below 50 meg, Verizon's current top speed on FiOS.
The best way to resolve this is with facts. Verizon has hundreds of employees living in Cablevision territory. For less than the cost of an attack ad, a statistically relevant sample can sign up and test the service in the next few weeks. If Cablevision's service doesn't deliver 50 megabits 95% of the time, I'll report the test results with a big headline twice. (50 meg is Verizon's current top speed.) In theory, Verizon certainly could be right. 160 meg shared would be blown out by even six to ten users all wanting peak speeds. In practice that's surprisingly rare. A while back I was amazed when an MIT Engineering Professor told me his home 36 megabit shared cable remarkably often actually delivers 20 meg. I've since learned that's the common experience, and downstream cable rarely hits peaks.There just aren't that many people watching 6 megabit, or even 2 megabit videos. Cablevision invited this by refusing to provide the facts in their announcement or follow-up. A claim of "up to 101 megabits" is deceptive if not a lie. Saying "101 megabits 90% of the time" would be much more helpful It wouldn't be lying for me to say "The wallet in my pocket has up to $10,000 in it." Unfortunately, that isn't a useful description. The Wall Street Journal shouldn't need to write, "Cablevision, Verizon Engage In War Of Words."
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