Revisiting broadband performance

Understanding the empirical characteristics of broadband performance is of intrinsic importance to users and providers, and has been a significant focus of recent efforts by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)[9]. A series of recent studies have reported results of empirical studies of broadband performance (e.g.,[11,15,22]). In this paper, we reappraise previous empirical findings on broadband performance. Our study is based on a unique corpus of crowd-sourced data consisting of over 54 million individual tests collected from 59 metropolitan markets over a 6 month period by Speedtest.net. Following analytic approaches from prior studies, our results confirm many of the raw performance results (upload/download/latency) for ISPs in specific US markets. However, the size and scope of our data enable us to examine the details of characteristics that were not identified in prior studies, thereby providing a more comprehensive view of broadband performance. Furthermore, we also report results of broadband performance characteristics in 35 metropolitan markets outside of the US. This not only provides an important baseline for future study in those markets, but also enables relative comparison of broadband performance between markets world wide.