What the FCC’s broadband tests really measure

[Commentary] The data in the “Measuring Broadband America” report released by the FCC on June 18th shows that Americans get the broadband speeds they pay for.

The report plainly says (page 14), “This Report finds that ISPs now provide 101 percent of advertised speeds.” This couldn’t be any clearer. The FCC even places this finding in context by contrasting it with the results from their preceding report, “The February 2013 Report showed that the ISPs included in the report were, on average, delivering 97 percent of advertised download speeds during the peak usage hours.”

The FCC report also engages in a rather peculiar exercise of measuring web page loading speeds and attributing them to ISPs. The FCC’s web loading time test actually says more about the web server than it does the network. This is nice data for researchers to have, but it tells us very little about ISP networks. For this to be a meaningful measurement, the FCC would also need to account for CDNs, web server location, and web server response time.

It would be good for the FCC to clearly separate ADSL from VDSL and for it to measure speeds up to 1 Gbps. Once it’s done with that, it’s fine for it to try to get a handle in web servers and interconnections, but it appears that the FCC has a long way to go before it really understands what it’s measuring.