FCC Wants to Test Broadband; Is Their Plan the Best?

The Federal Communications Commission wants to better understand the state of broadband. To accomplish this, the organization is seeking to enlist 10,000 people to help conduct a broadband performance study.

Ookla (News - Alert), the company behind Speedtest.net and Pingetst.net, has performed more than 1.5 billion broadband tests and this data is being updated by millions of test daily and then published for free in the newly launched Net Index.


While it would seem a marriage between Ookla and the FCC (News - Alert) would be a logical choice, the FCC has instead opted to rely on the costly Sam Knows program to conduct its own testing, relying on tax payer funds to gather this information instead of relying on a proven provider who has already done the work.

So what is the biggest con to the Sam's Knows program? According to Ookla officials, "One huge one is cost - this will be an expensive project using taxpayer dollars which in the end will result in a much smaller set of similar data than we would provide at no cost."

Ookla's solutions provide more than the traditional "speed test" solutions. The company's applications perform both throughput - download and upload speeds - and quality - packet loss, jitter and latency - tests that are considered to be widely accepted as the fundamental attributes necessary to evaluate an Internet connection.

Another advantage that Ookla can offer to the industry, as well as the FCC, is that its paid licensing division can count nearly every major Internet Service Provider (ISP) in the world as a client, including more than 80 percent of the top ISPs in the U.S., and a wide variety of organizations all around the world, including the FCC.

Even with the wealth of information available from Ookla - which it provides to the FCC, universities and other research institutions - there have been some detractors who have recently suggested that this data is unscientific due to the "self-selected" nature of the participants and is therefore largely useless for policy makers. 

Let's take a look at the bigger picture, however. When comparing the Sam Knows (News - Alert) program and Ookla, both are relying on people volunteering to participate in the test pool because they are interested in the topic of broadband.

The Sam Knows test will gather data from 10,000 participants or 0.015 percent of the number of visitors to Speedtest.net (News - Alert) in the past year and 0.158 percent of the pool used to build the current values at Net Index. In nearly all scenarios, more data is widely considered a valuable aspect of any statistical analysis.

Other than these obvious differences, what would be the advantage of using Ookla tests? According to Ookla officials: "Aside from the much larger data set based on significantly more participants in the US, we also have the same data for every country in the world to compare against.

 

"We also have over three years of historical data which they will not get with this new project. We are also completely up and running already - this Sam Knows project requires a selection process, hardware to be sent out and then you are still only looking at an average of 200 testers per state."

For those who are asking why the FCC doesn't rely on Ookla data and those concerned with the specific methodology employed, the company encourages them to read their complete report now.