Optimisation not fibre optics required to get better broadband speeds

Claims that consumers will not see any real benefits from the increased capacity created by the governments National Broadband network and that the optimisation of the current broadband services would produce much better results has been made by the local head of a network optimisation specialist.

The scathing attack came from the head of Riverbed Technology, a specialist in wide area network optimisation saying that deploying optimisation technology for wide area networks throughout the country would reap far greater benefits than just increasing the pipe capacity by laying fibre optic cabling, which is what the government is currently planning to do through the NBN.

The managing director of Riverbed technologies for New Zealand and Australia, Steve Dixon said “When the government says it is putting in the NBN and it is going to give blindingly fast access to everybody they are forgetting that big bandwidth does not give speed unless your fundamental problem is congestion, but if congestion is only one cause of slowness the NBN is going to do nothing for access. The government is making this promise of blindingly fast speed and there will be an awful lot of services that will see no improvement at all, so there could be a huge backlash.”

He added “If the government were thinking intelligently instead of rolling out fibre for the next 10 years they should be saying ‘let us look at this intelligently and maybe the deployment of optimisation products would meet the objectives they want and they could do it very quickly.”

The throughput of data over a wide area network is often restricted to just a tiny amount of the actual bandwidth that is available and this is often due to a combination of network latency and massive levels of dialogue used by many of the applications that work on a network like this and internet protocol traffic, said Mr Dixon.

Source – IT Wire