{"id":11587,"date":"2017-10-10T06:06:16","date_gmt":"2017-10-10T10:06:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mhgoldberg.com\/blog\/?p=11587"},"modified":"2017-10-09T11:33:18","modified_gmt":"2017-10-09T15:33:18","slug":"specifying-requirements-not-solutions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mhgoldberg.com\/blog\/?p=11587","title":{"rendered":"What mobile speed tests teach"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Essential Phone<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/a><\/p>\n

This past weekend, how many people went into hardware stores looking for nails?<\/p>\n

Very few.<\/p>\n

Of those who came out of the store with nails, most went into the store looking for a way to hold two pieces of wood together. Some of those people chose nails; others chose screws; some decided on glue; some are going to make a dove-tail joint; and then there are those like me who decided that duct tape would be just fine.<\/p>\n

I have used this metaphor before, describing the need to apply a systems engineering approach for broadband<\/a>. It is often a real challenge to define requirements without specifying a solution, allowing flexibility in the choice of technologies to satisfy the requirements.<\/p>\n

Frequently, I have said that we need to ensure that we remain technologically agnostic, even though so many associate fibre with advanced broadband. Through the weekend, I tweeted a few mobile speed tests that I conducted, looking at how the TELUS and Freedom Mobile networks performed with a couple of the latest devices optimized for performance on each of the respective networks.<\/p>\n

Frankly, I could probably talk for hours about the implications of the 4 pictures attached to the two tweets that you can examine below. I want to focus on the headline speed results from the TELUS network on a Saturday afternoon driving south on Bathurst Street near Eglinton Avenue. The download speed was close to 175Mbps, a speed that would thrill most for achievement on home networks, let alone mobile. Can we finally put to rest the view that advanced broadband needs fibre connections?<\/p>\n

The network performance comparisons raise other issues that might merit further discussion, including:<\/p>\n