New America Blasts Pending FCC Broadband Speed Tests Results
Upcoming results from a broadband speed study should be viewed skeptically because the FCC has been captured by ISPs, said New America Foundation Director Sascha Meinrath. “Even though we have been a core partner on this project and were a part of the official meetings for months and months, recently, we have not been invited to any of the meetings (nor have we seen ex partes from those meetings),” he said in an email exchange. Earlier meetings where ISPs discussed SamKnows work with agency officials were reported in such filings, and Meinrath was talking about the results of the SamKnows study involving 13 Internet companies. Release of the speed study has been pushed back to August (CD July 19 p14).
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"It appears that the FCC is only inviting ISPs to attend its meetings with SamKnows,” Meinrath said. “We did petition the FCC, in writing, to be a part of these meetings, but they have (as of now) not responded.” Commission representatives had no comment.
New America said Tuesday it’s using its own broadband speed tester, called the M-lab. It’s a result of cooperation between New America, Google and PlanetLab Consortium. The M-lab relies on a tool called the Broadband Internet Service Benchmark, or BISMark, which is led by Georgia Tech. “The BISMark team” will be “[w]orking with SamKnows and the FCC,” said a news release on M-lab.
In a series of briefings with FCC and SamKnows staff over the summer, ISPs have been told they generally are meeting or exceeding their advertised speeds. “USTelecom and our member companies are actually very eager to learn the results of the SamKnows project and, in fact, have urged the Commission to release the report as expeditiously and transparently as possible,” a USTelecom spokesman said. Verizon’s experience through the SamKnows experience has been “good, has been transparent,” a spokesman for that company said. “Overall, I think people believe it has been a positive experience.” AT&T looks “forward to seeing the results of the report,” a spokesman said.
Meinrath said he doesn’t believe them. “Any industry representative that says that ISPs are, en masse, delivering actual speeds that match their advertised speeds is lying,” he said. “As for why [FCC Chairman Julius] Genachowski is sitting on the results, I have no idea since the FCC has been meeting behind closed doors with industry representatives, but not with our team of technologists and network scientists. I worry that these secret negotiations will lead to incredibly bad data being released by the FCC -- data that aggregates to the level of being useless for consumers (but protecting ISPs from anything that might be embarrassing).”