An Australian Communications Authority working group has abandoned proposals to give consumers performance indicators to assess Internet services when shopping for a new provider.
Only one of four indicators of service speed and accessibility, proposed in a draft version of the Internet Service Provider consumer information guidelines released by the Australian Communications Authority (ACA) in April, have survived the final document released today.
ACA board member Allan Horsley said the working group chose to abandon plans to give consumers specific performance indicators because it could not reach agreement on how to make ISPs disclose them.
Horsley said that Internet services often involved a range of providers making it difficult to place the onus on ISP's to account for their performance.
"You were really asking an ISP to commit to something that they were not in control of," said Horsley.
He added that technical difference between the delivery of broadband and dial-up Internet services made it difficult for the group to agree on a single, consistent performance reporting mechanism.
The proposed version of the guideline included seven indicators of performance. Of those, four indicators could have helped tech-savvy consumers build a picture of the speed and reliability of a service, according to the ACA.
They included the ratio of customers to individual input connections for dial-up services, the ratio of delivery speed between peak and off-peak hours, an ISP's average bandwidth utilisation during the peak periods, and an indication of the number of hours that an ISP's modems are utilised over weekdays.
While some of the seven indicators have been moved to other parts of the final version of the guideline, only one of the four indicators referring to performance specifically remains. Compliant ISPs must state how many hours their modems were fully utilised each week passed.
The release of the guidelines has also been a source of some embarrassment for the ACA this morning. The ACA released the guideline in a document format in which recent edits to the document were still visible.
ZDNet Australia notes that a part of the document referring to service level agreements had been struck out in a recent edit.
The working group also abandoned proposals to make compliant ISPs state whether they comply with System Administrator Guild security recommendations.
