Monday, November 1, 2010

Regulation [Israel] - ISPs Should Publish Minimum Speed! (in "Mbps")

   
The Israeli sites, Globes and Calcalist, report today that the local regulator, the Ministry of Communications, is considering the implementation of two new regulations related to the way ISP publish thier service plans:
  • ISPs will have to use the term Mbps (megabits per second). It turns out that today, some ISPs use terms like "10 Mega" without indicating the time unit .. :-).

    From my personal experience, the confusion and mistakes are usually between volume (GigaBytes/Month - mainly in mobile service) and speed (Mbps) and mixing Bytes and Bits.
     
  • And the more significant directive - ISP will have to publish a committed minimum speed, rather than the maximum modem speed (use the term "minimum" instead of "up to").
Stories [in Hebrew] - here (Globes) and here (Calcalist).

While I don't think that any ISP will say one day "we meant 10 Mbps per day", the latter decision is significantly more difficult to implement and argue.

Does it refer to the physical speed? Actual throughput? How this is going to be verified?

Related posts - "Israel: Establishing the Wholesale Market" - here.

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