Nice report with numbers for my provider matching what I've seen. However, there is no mention of bandwidth caps, internet downtime, or availability of competing services. These three factors should be reported on as well.
Agreed. Downtime in NYC from TWC is painful. Youtube actually has a tool that shows much of the information available in this report for your own connection: http://www.youtube.com/my_speed
Strangely enough, in the FCC's wireless report, they could not come to a conclusion about the state of competition in the wireless industry. I would imagine that coming to a conclusion about wireline broadband would be equally (if not more) difficult for them.
Really? I run nagios at home, and right now it says year-to-date I've had 28m 40s of downtime, for 99.988% uptime of my cable internet service (for the host monitoring my first-hop router). This is in Chelsea, Manhattan, with their "wideband" level of service.
Agreed, very narrow focus and although the results are positive, the publication does little to spur on development in this industry. American ISPs, we need to talk.
I'm actually doing some research on this topic right now in grad school. I think there is definitely a lot more that can be done in this area; we're looking at things like time-of-day congestion, traffic management policy, actual application performance, and reliability. I think, as you said, there is a lot more to this than just bandwidth measurements. For example, last November a bunch of DNS servers went down in Comcast's networks that essentially meant no Internet for the majority of people that don't know how to configure public DNS.
We're working to eventually get a much finer grain survey of performance (e.g. a neighborhood), by piggy backing on network-intensive applications (currently BitTorrent). In addition to throughput, we're looking at things such as packet loss, latency (the last-mile in particular), time-of-day effects, as well as using traceroutes for underlying forward-path analysis.
My point is, if anyone has any ideas for other applications (something like Netflix would be great) to leverage, metrics to include, or advice, I'd be happy to hear them. :)
