Internet Speed Measurement: Current Challenges and Future Recommendations
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Government organizations, regulators, consumers, Internet service providers, and application providers alike all have an interest in measuring user Internet "speed". A decade ago, speed measurement was more straightforward. Today, as access speeds have increased by an order of magnitude---many users have multi-hundred megabits per second service and gigabit speeds are available to tens of millions of homes---conventional approaches to speed testing no longer accurately reflect the user experience. Worse, some tests are increasingly divorced from performance metrics that users care about---the performance of the applications that they use---and others are completely unable to accurately measure contemporary broadband speeds. This paper offers historical and technical background on current speed testing methods, highlights their limitations as access network speeds continue to increase, and offers recommendations for the next generation of Internet "speed" measurement.
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