Paul Budde, a telecommunications analyst from Australia, rather shocked me by suggesting in his blog that we shouldn’t even try to define broadband. And yet he provides instant clarity that goes straight to the heart of the debate.

I think broadband is a concept and I believe each country will have to develop its own National Broadband Plan, based on its own political, social, economic, historical, technological and geographic situation. What might apply to Australia will most certainly not apply to Rwanda, and what applies to the USA will not apply to China.

Budde appears to have fallen into the usual trap of thinking that we should attach a number to a definition of broadband. But if broadband is the concept of internet connectivity rather than a specific telecoms service, then surely it doesn’t need that number? I firmly believe that we should avoid adding speeds to any definition of broadband, because – as Budde points out – bandwidth requirements are a moveable feast.

Yet I do believe is is important to define broadband and I don’t think this is a difficult job. These days the term broadband has become synonymous with always-on access to the internet. In my view that’s perfectly adequate as a definition. Life doesn’t have to be complicated.

What policy makers really want to know is what sort of broadband service they should stipulate in their broadband plans. What kind of applications will we be using and how much bandwidth is needed to run them? What should the performance indicators be, and how can they be enforced?

Maybe you think I’m splitting hairs, but setting political targets for broadband is very different beast from writing a definition. A definition is forever; a policy only lasts until the next general election.

While we’re on the subject, we also need a definition for next-generation access (NGA), which is another term that causes a great deal of confusion. Here’s the definition of NGA from the Digital Britain report:

NGA is the term used to describe the physical infrastructure and set of technologies which can be used to deliver super-fast broadband. These include fibre to the home or premises (FTTH), fibre to the cabinet (FTTC), cable, fixed or mobile wireless, and satellite.

Full marks to the report writers for recognising that NGA is about infrastructure. But by relating it to superfast broadband, which has no clear definition, the result is less than satisfactory.

Don’t even get me started on “superfast”. No doubt this clumsy adjective was dreamed up by a marketing department somewhere in order to sell the latest product. In a few short years we’ve progressed from high-speed to very-high-speed to superfast, and left absolutely no headroom for whatever comes next. Super-dooper like-sh*t-off-a-shovel fast broadband, anyone?

Seriously though, as part of a project I’m working on I need to explain broadband terminology in a way that’s acessible to the average person outside the telco industry. You can read my first attempt here (if you’ve read this far I’m sure you can manage one more click), and I would appreciate any feedback. Thanks in advance!

For those of you who haven’t come across it yet, Samknows was set up in 2003 to provide campaigners in the UK with the information needed to bring broadband to their area. It was instrumental in aggregating demand for broadband services, which was important in the early days of first-generation broadband when BT set “trigger levels” for exchange activation.

Now that all of the telephone exchanges have been converted to ADSL, the focus of Samknows has necessarily changed to providing services, in particular a project with Ofcom to create a method of benchmarking ISPs. This work resulted in a well-publicised report earlier this year that provided hard evidence on a topic that consumers had been complaining about for some time — namely that broadband speeds aren’t exactly “as advertised”.

Samknows is now looking at other applications for its broadband monitoring platform, and has tweaked the technology to meet the needs of ISPs that wish to measure their own performance. UK cable operator Virgin Media has appointed Samknows to conduct an independent trial; Samknows’ plan is to expand its broadband monitoring business to other ISPs and beyond the UK.

The news at www.samknows.com is intended to add context to the solutions that the company provides. For the latest updates, you can follow Samknows on Twitter. And if you have some hot story leads, please get in touch!