Denmark’s TDC telephone company is so confident about their network upgrades, they are ready to guarantee customers will get the broadband speeds advertised, or their money back and a commitment to fix the problem.
Most phone companies selling DSL service have always had to qualify their speed marketing claims with words like “up to” because customers further away from central switching offices or remote hubs won’t necessarily get the speeds on offer. The further away a customer lives from a telephone company facility, the slower the speeds on copper-based networks. Total network capacity can also create problems during peak usage periods, but not for TDC, which says it has a network robust enough to handle demand.
TDC’s Guaranteed Speed Tiers (US$):
- Basic: 20/2Mbps $47
- Enhanced: 30/5Mbps $49.50
- Superior: 40/10Mbps $53
- Extreme: 50/10Mbps $55
“With this initiative we want [to show] how communication to broadband customers can be further improved,” said Rene Brochner, director of TDC’s residential service division. “With the new products we now offer we guarantee that the speed is always [as advertised]. For example, the 40Mbps/10Mbps speed is always 40Mbps/10Mbps.”
Two-thirds of Denmark will be upgraded to 20/2Mbps service by the middle of this year, with another 750,000 households qualified for 50Mbps service because of TDC’s investment in fiber and pair bonding. Next year, TDC will add Vectoring technology, which will improve speeds on existing copper lines to as much as 100Mbps.
Guaranteed implies no oversubscription, or at least the assumption that usage will be multiplexed sufficiently across peak periods as to mitigate the chance of that occurring. Very interesting announcement in light of what’s going on in the US with Netflix.
They could also greatly overprovision speeds. AT&T just started slightly doing that and Time Warner did that as well last year.
The speed guarantee no doubt applies to their own speed tests, not to the performance of external websites, which they cannot control.