Broadband Internet Performance: A View From the Gateway

Policymakers, ISPs, and users are increasingly interested in studying the performance of Internet access links. This talk will first present our findings on the the accuracy and overhead of state-of-the-art available bandwidth estimation tools to measure residential broadband throughput. Because of many confounding factors in a home network or on end hosts, however, thoroughly understanding access network performance requires deploying measurement infrastructure in users’ homes as gateway devices. This talk will then present the first study of network access link performance measured directly from home gateway devices. In conjunction with the Federal Communication Commission’s study of broadband Internet access in the United States, we study the throughput and latency of network access links using longitudinal measurements from nearly 4,000 gateway devices across 8 ISPs from a deployment of over 4,200 devices. We study the performance users achieve and how various factors ranging from the user’s choice of modem to the ISP’s traffic shaping policies can affect performance. Our study yields many important findings about the characteristics of existing access networks. Our findings also provide insights into the ways that access network performance should be measured and presented to users, which can help inform ongoing broader efforts to benchmark the performance of access networks.

The work presented in this talk appeared at:

• O. Goga, R. Teixeira, "Speed Measurements of Residential Internet Access", in Proc. of Passive and Active Measurement Conference, March 2012.
• S. Sundaresan, W. de Donato, N. Feamster, R. Teixeira, S. Crawford, and A. Pescape, "Broadband Internet Performance: A View From the Gateway", in Proc. of ACM SIGCOMM, August 2011.

Renata Teixeira received the B.Sc. degree in computer science and the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1997 and 1999, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of California, San Diego, in 2005. During her Ph.D. studies, she worked on Internet routing at the AT&T Research. She is currently a researcher with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) at LIP6, UPMC Sorbonne Universites, Paris, France. She was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeyley/ICSI. Her research interests are in measurement, analysis, and management of data networks. She has authored more than 40 papers in this area. Renata serves in the editorial board of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking and of the ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review. She is also a member of the steering committee of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference and has been active in the program committees of ACM SIGCOMM, ACM IMC, PAM, IEEE INFOCOM, among others.