The Need for More Than Speed
At a debate yesterday hosted by the New America Foundation, Blair Levin, who led the development of the national broadband plan last year, made a comment on Internet speeds, and the goal to deliver 100-Mbps service to every home in the country by 2020. Levin stated that he believes the public discussion around the plan over-emphasizes connection speeds, and that it should instead focus on the applications being enabled.
Although it’s hard to argue that we shouldn’t aim for speeds of 100 Mbps and higher, Levin brings up an interesting point in turning the conversation to user experiences. He’s referring to broadband use cases, but you could equally use the argument to examine what factors other than speed contribute to performance. Issues like latency and application efficiency also play a role in the quality of a user’s experience. Note the post on the Netflix Tech Blog today that references a single device being responsible for a significant portion of Netflix API requests. Since streaming reports from the device aren’t comparable, that suggests application and/or API inefficiency, and it impacts how users experience Netflix streaming.
To go even further, if you look at websites more generically, there are plenty of on-site factors that create a better experience and are entirely independent of connection speed – factors like page layout, content storage rules, and streamlined search. Speed is clearly important, but it’s not the only attribute to optimize for. There’s a lot more to the performance package.
