Global "Last Mile" Performance Stats Going Public

Ookla, the company behind Speedtest.net, Pingtest.net, and the bandwidth testing apps deployed at many ISPs, has gone public with Net performance stats from 1.5 billion users (and counting). Their Net Index page displays download speed, upload speed, and connection "quality" from the EU and the G8, to countries, worldwide cities, and US states. Beginning today, the company is also making detailed (anonymized) data available to academics. "Ookla will also start surveying users about how much they pay for broadband and how much bandwidth they were promised by their ISPs. The results of those questions will go into building a Value Index, which will show how much people around the world pay per megabit-per-second for Internet access. In addition, by collecting postal codes from Speedtest users, Ookla hopes to map broadband service to local economic conditions, Apgar said. The Speedtest data could give the US government far more information to work with in setting priorities for its National Broadband Plan..."

Comments

Re:Disclaimer: I am an unabashed American.

[Archangel Michael]

We should be taxing sin, not income.

Then, we would all would be rich, and have a well funded government.

But that is too "Regressive" for the "progressives" who would rather reward failure and punish success.

Re:B.S. anyway

[PopeRatzo]

It implies this stupid argument that somehow a nation is a better place to live because it has faster average internet access.

"faster internet access" is only one of very many things that can go into a judgment about "better places to live".

While I agree that it's not as high on the list as universal public-funded health care, publicly funded elections, clean environment, good public schools, climate and water supply, you can't say that having faster internet couldn't possibly be one of the factors that a person would use when choosing a place to live.

More important is that these listings can be used politically, as in "how come South Koreans get more bandwidth than Americans, when we invented the internet". Or, "how come such-and-such a country have free wireless but in the US we get gouged by monopolies"?