Punters no longer obsess about the size of their mobile phone. It\'s broadband speeds they worry about.
Governments, too, have started to fret and are preparing to spend some taxpayers\' hard-earned on boosting broadband.
In the US, the Obama Administration has set aside $7.2 billion for broadband - admittedly a snip in the giant $787 billion stimulus package, but a nice contribution anyway to the cause of improving bitspeed.
But just what are those speeds‾
UK regulator Ofcom recently discovered that broadband customers were getting just 49% of the \'headline\' speed promised by ISPs. One in five of those on an \'up to\' 8 Mbps package receive an average speed of less than 2 Mbps.
Her Majesty\'s Government has promised a minimum of 2 Mbps as part of its own jolt to the economy.
In northeast Asia, the ducts are paved with fiber: Koreans and Japanese enjoy the world\'s most advanced fiber access deployments. Hong Kong consumers have access to up to 1-Gbps download speeds for less than $200 a month.
In Singapore, which regularly tops \'world\'s most wired economies\' surveys, these things are not left to chance.
The government is making sure that broadband users know exactly what they are paying for.
The Singapore IDA runs what is surely the world\'s most intensive broadband quality monitoring operation, testing speeds each month and posting the results online.
IDA\'s chief technology officer Tan Geok Leng said that it has been monitoring broadband since 2006, when ISPs began introducing higher-speed plans - \'we were wondering were they really offering speeds that they promised.\'
It\'s a job that naturally falls to the agency, which plays the role of industry developer as well as telecom regulator. It has been measuring cellular coverage for years to ensure mobile operators meet their license commitments.
But monitoring broadband is not quite as simple. It has a lot of moving parts, and misleading figures could rebound embarrassingly on the IDA.
As Tan says, the host web server may be under-dimensioned, the DSLAMs may be overloaded, the ISP may be using older routers, or the user\'s PC may be running a strong anti-virus program.
How accurate‾
\'You cannot tell whether it is slow because of the computer, or perhaps the router is out of date. We wanted the ISPs to respond, so we had to be fair. If the web server is overloaded and slowing down, it is unfair to blame the ISP.\'
So the IDA goes to a lot of trouble. \'We set up four servers, controlled by us and that are appropriately dimensioned,\' said Tan. One server is in each of the three major local ISPs, plus one additional for OneNet, the government data center - \'we also want to see what performance people get from the government servers.\'
The IDA team measures latency from server to end-user and throughput from the server to the user, using \'clean and standardized PCs\'. A standard commercial tool measures the throughput.
The IDA publishes the results on its web site without any comment.
'It's for the user to decide what kind of performance he is looking for.'
How do people measure the performance of the measurement process‾
'In the blogosphere people do talk about it. t gets about 1,500-2,000 visitors a month. It gives transparency so consumers can make informed decisions.'
I asked Tan if a similar initiative is planned for mobile broadband.
He says that like broadband, mobile data is not a regulatory condition, and the market is quite competitive. And, of course too much regulation is no good. But the IDA is happy with the result from its broadband monitoring.
But the answer is, yes, it's being looked at.