Measure Your Broadband, Do It for Your Country
BY Nancy Scola | Friday, March 12 2010
Credit: daleonsouth (Photo caption: "Discovered I was without internet a couple of days ago...")Just days before the Federal Communications Commission is set to make its über-exciting announcement of its new national broadband strategy, the Commission has launched a pair of web tools that empower citizens to measure the current state of American broadband.
The first new web tool from the FCC is the Broadband Speed Test. Input your street address, and the tool uses either the Ookla or M-Lab measuring programs to assess just how fast your Internet connection is, on four metrics -- upload speed, download speed, latency, and jitter (which seems to measure the stability of your hook-up). The exciting bit there is that, accompanied by a push for broadband labelings akin to nutrition labels, consumers might now have a better sense of just how big and steady a pipe they're paying for, and how big and steady a pipe they're actually getting.
The FCC's second new web tool is a "Broadband Dead Zone" tool with which Americans can let the federal government know that they're not getting broadband in their homes, and whether or not they'd like to be.
On one level, the Broadband Speed Test and Broadband Dead Zone finder are a pair of nifty consumer-empowering tools. But they're also more than that, in an institutional sense. Accurate real-time data on where broadband runs in the U.S., how expensive it is, how reliable it is -- that's treated like the Queen's jewels by the telecom companies. Coping with the current state of U.S. broadband is difficult when you're oblivious to what the current state of U.S. broadband really is. What we're looking at here is an attempt to give the government a bit more of an even hand in that relationship.
Not bad for a couple of basic web tools.