FCC to Release Flawed ISP Speed Data—with Disclaimer
Despite the protestations of the NCTA and USTelecom, the FCC plans to publicly release flawed ISP speed data collected by a commission contractor in March. The report will be accompanied by a disclaimer that server issues in New York and Los Angeles “distorted test results for a significant number of panelists across various ISPs participating in the study” and was “unreliable and flawed,” said an ex parte filing the FCC itself made. The commission will say it won’t use the data to compare the performance of different ISPs in the 2012 report. “Anomalies” in the network affected some of the measurement locations toward the end of March, so the monthlong data collection phase was restarted in April (CD May 7 p8).
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NCTA attorney Steven Morris argued the data might still be “abused by parties to make inaccurate comparisons of carriers’ performance,” said the filing detailing the meeting of several industry stakeholders and the FCC (http://xrl.us/bm9qp2). “We know the data’s not accurate for the purpose it was intended for,” Morris told us. NCTA appreciates that the commission won’t use the flawed March data in its own reporting, “but we have a concern about other people using it,” he said. “A disclaimer is not a strong enough way to address the problem.” NCTA, which represents about half the companies participating in the broadband test being done by FCC contractor SamKnows, is “still evaluating what to do next” regarding the release of the March data, Morris said. Glenn Reynolds, vice president of USTelecom, shares similar concerns as those expressed by NCTA, and mentioned those concerns at the meeting, a USTelecom spokeswoman said.
The commission’s commitment to open data and transparency would be “compromised” if the data weren’t released, wrote Walter Johnston, chief of the Electromagnetic Compatibility Division of the Office of Engineering and Technology. He made the filing. The data release policy of M-Lab, the software on which the tests were conducted, also required release of the data, he wrote. Representatives of M-Lab said the errant data would be valuable for purposes other than comparison of carrier performance, “and these benefits weighed in favor of releasing the data,” the filing said. “This is a very rich data set,” M-Lab Program Manager Meredith Whitacre told us. It doesn’t just include speed results, it has information on transmission control protocol states across network paths “that ... go into a lot of detail about what’s going on,” she said.
The FCC’s open data policy is “consistent with best practices within the government” (http://xrl.us/bm9qui), said a slide presentation from FCC staff attached to the filing. The commission “wholeheartedly supports” the M-Labs data release policy, and “all data [is] to be released,” a slide said. The April speed data collected by SamKnows showed no evidence of the server issues observed in March, and its analysis is proceeding smoothly, SamKnows representatives told officials at the May 16 meeting. SamKnows expects to release a draft report to the FCC for comment by June 11, the filing said.
Also May 16, several stakeholders met for the second convening of the FCC’s Next-Generation Measurement Architecture Standardization and Outreach Group, said an ex parte filing released Tuesday (http://xrl.us/bm9quz). The group discussed the ways in which it can best facilitate “the practical implementation of standards being developed in the broadband space,” the filing said. Johnston discussed potentially working with the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Broadband Forum to develop standards. The filing said a Google representative suggested the group’s role be “less prescriptive,” but instead more of “the research wing of the larger Measuring Broadband America project, working with academics and other expert stakeholders to understand the efficacy of the broad array of current measurement approaches.”