We've just published a report of the technology roundtable we held last month on the topic of bandwidth management. The agenda for this invitation-only meeting was kept deliberately broad and encompassed everything from rates of submarine cable deployment to active queue management algorithms in residential broadband gateways. We hoped for an interesting and informative two days and that's certainly what we got. The report captures the range of the discussion and also the key takeaways from each of the sessions.

 

One of the key findings was that there is now a strong need for tools capable of performing network measurements and presenting an easily understandable metric to consumers, operators and regulators to help shift the debate about broadband quality away from speed and bandwidth as the only, or even the key metric in determining Internet performance. Latency management (by which we mean controlling for and minimizing unnecessary network transmission delays) is the root of many of the problems and evolutionary trends we are seeing on the Internet today. Queue latency (where data packets are delayed in the network) is often the dominant determining factor in perceived Internet performance rather than raw bandwidth.

 

We expect this meeting and the findings of this report to inform our work on bandwidth management through 2013. Helping to support industry initiatives to improve the quality of the broadband edge and helping researchers get the data they need to improve the algorithms and protocols that govern a lot of the perceived quality of end-user Internet experience are two key areas of future work.