Broadband internet performance

Abstract

We present the first study of network access link performance measured directly from home gateway devices. Policymakers, ISPs, and users are increasingly interested in studying the performance of Internet access links. Because of many confounding factors in a home network or on end hosts, however, thoroughly understanding access network performance requires deploying measurement infrastructure in users' homes as gateway devices. In conjunction with the Federal Communication Commission's study of broadband Internet access in the United States, we study the throughput and latency of network access links using longitudinal measurements from nearly 4,000 gateway devices across 8 ISPs from a deployment of over 4,200 devices. We study the performance users achieve and how various factors ranging from the user's choice of modem to the ISP's traffic shaping policies can affect performance. Our study yields many important findings about the characteristics of existing access networks. Our findings also provide insights into the ways that access network performance should be measured and presented to users, which can help inform ongoing broader efforts to benchmark the performance of access networks.

BSense: A Flexible and Open-Source Broadband Mapping Framework

“…It is pioneered by SamKnows [10] for UK Ofcom and US FCC sponsored broadband speed studies, and is also considered recently in the academic community [11]. This approach can be expensive than an equivalent software based measurement approach.…”

“…Flexibility is also important to accommodate the wide range of broadband access technologies and to factor in latest advances and best practice in terms of measurement techniques. Moreover, these efforts take one of two different approaches we refer to as model based (e.g., [7][8][9]) and measurement based (e.g., [10,11,5,12,6,13,14]) even though neither is enough -model based approaches fail to capture the discrepancy between expected and actual broadband quality experienced by consumers, whereas measurement based approaches are clearly not useful for identifying notspots. We further discuss these different broadband mapping approaches in §2.…”

“…Broadband quality assessment in BSense is based on hostbased continuous measurement stream obtained using our multi-platform and technology-adaptive software client, which periodically runs as a background process on users' computers. As elaborated in §2, the measurement paradigm employed in BSense results in a lower-cost and flexible alternative to [10,11], and reduces measurement bias compared to [5,12,14]. -Unique to BSense is a flexible broadband quality index for summarizing the collective effect of various underlying attributes such as download/upload speeds and latency.…”

Characterizing Home Network Traffic: An Inside View

“…[23] measures and analyzes the behavior characteristics of a variety of home gateways such as DSL and cable modems, including NAT binding timeout, throughput, and protocol support, and their influence on network performance and user experience. A recent work [24] measures network access link performance directly from home gateway devices, and has inspired us to characterize network traffic from inside home networks through programmable home routers.…”

A hybrid edge-cloud architecture for reducing on-demand gaming latency

“…Three quarters of end-users who are equipped with a DSL connection experience a t access greater than 10 ms when the network is idle [25], and the average access delay exceeds 40 ms on a loaded link [54]. The behaviour of different network access technologies can greatly vary, as the latency of the access network can differ by a factor of three between different Internet Service Providers (ISP) [54]. Additionally, the home network configuration and the number of concurrent active computers per network access can double access link latency [24].…”