Google Hopes Broadband Speed Map Will Brew ‘Discontent’

Google and the New America Foundation took the wraps off a broadband map that displays median download and upload speeds around the world, making use of open, publicly available M-Lab data. “There’s a lot of assertions” about global broadband rankings, “but those are often not very quantitative, so we're very interested in making those more crisp and understandable,” said Google Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf, demonstrating the tool at a New America Foundation event Wednesday. Speakers also discussed broadband usage caps and bandwidth-intensive video apps such as Netflix.

Cerf said he hopes the Google tool will “generate discontent” about current broadband speeds and prompt efforts to improve them. The data would be improved with additional servers feeding in information, Cerf said. “There are dozens” of M-Lab servers, “but we would like hundreds or thousands of them so they are more uniformly distributed around the Internet.” Sample bias is an issue, because the tool relies on users’ reporting data about their connections, said Sascha Meinrath, director of the foundation’s Open Technology Initiative. “One way to help alleviate that is to end up with … a sample that grows so large it starts mirroring the population.” But M-Labs can make a comparison to a random sample and correct for any major differences, he said.

The detail provided by the tool could be useful to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD economist Taylor Reynolds said on a panel discussion after Google’s demonstration. The group’s data have been “fairly high level,” and the analysis provided by the Google tool provides a “finer level of detail” that will allow economists to “actually start digging in and give policymakers much more detail in terms of their decision making,” he said.

"With big data comes big responsibility,” said Anne Neville, a director at the NTIA. Open data is exciting, she said; the challenge “is getting through all it in a responsible way and coming out with recommendations and analyses that really take into account the full breadth.” The M-Lab information is different from that for the NTIA’s National Broadband Map, so although the prospect of mashing up the data is exciting, it also will be challenging, she said.

Data usage caps are common around the world, especially for wireless, but caps in the U.S. are higher than other countries’, Reynolds said. Cerf doesn’t like usage-based caps. They discourage people from using the Internet because users can’t easily measure how much data they're using and will fear accidentally using too much, he said. It would be better to have a bandwidth cap that doesn’t charge users overages but throttles down a user’s capacity when the limit is exceeded, he said. In other countries with data caps, some operators shape traffic and hold down speeds when a user goes over a limit during a time of congestion, Reynolds said.

Faster broadband would solve congestion problems caused by Netflix, Cerf said. Streaming stresses a network for long periods, but a 1 Gbps connection would allow users to download entire videos in 15 seconds, affecting the network for only a short “burst.” Streaming video as Netflix does is “incredibly inefficient,” agreed Meinrath. “What’s weird about this is that if you downloaded your movie at night, it wouldn’t be any problem. But we've created applications like Netflix that stream live during peak usage hours.”