FCC to Measure Deployment of Various Internet Technologies
The FCC’s broadband measuring group plans to turn its attention to measuring deployment of Internet technologies, commission officials said during meetings Thursday. The FCC did a “proof of concept” study looking at deployment of Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) about a year ago, and saw value in continuing the program, said Walter Johnston, chief of the Electromagnetic Compatibility Division of the Office of Engineering and Technology. The agency also plans to study the effect of legacy in-home equipment on the broadband speeds delivered to the home, officials said.
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Details of the study, which would occur in calendar Q4, are still open for discussion, officials said. Generally, the study would analyze deployment, specifically how many servers are using DNSSEC on their server side. “It’s an important component to cybersecurity and protecting the infrastructure,” said James Miller, FCC attorney adviser. It could be valuable in informing the public about level of deployment, and getting a better view of cybersecurity readiness, he said.
The FCC might also measure deployment of IPv6 technologies, “if we can boil it down to a good concept,” Johnston said. Can the commission do something of value, with good engineering, and provide useful insight? he asked. “If we can, that would be great.” Doing such studies year by year is important to standardizing a metric and carrying the work forward, he said. “The value is not the number itself, but the trend."
Earlier in the year, the FCC plans to collect data on wireless bottlenecks inside the home, in collaboration with Georgia Tech (CD May 3 p1). The market is getting faster, but legacy equipment is affecting speeds that the end user gets, said Alex Salter, CEO of U.K. measuring company SamKnows, to which the FCC contracts out speed tests. “This isn’t monitoring traffic; it’s just looking at the packet header layer,” said Miller. “So it’s not introspective in any way. And of course, we don’t do any collection of any personal information of any kind.” The technique looks at arrival times of the streams looking through the white box, but doesn’t look at application type, Miller said.
The 2013 Measuring Broadband America report will be released in February, officials said. It was the “smoothest data collection year we've ever had,” Johnston said. It was also the first year of using a dual measuring platform provided by Level 3 and Measurement Lab, said Salter. “That really worked for us,” providing a degree of redundancy previously lacking, he said.
The agency plans to release an iPhone version of its mobile speed test app in the first three months of the year, officials said. It will have the same look and feel of the recently released Android app, but it will collect fewer network metrics because of restrictions on the iOS platform, they said. The app has been submitted to Apple’s app store and is awaiting approval, they said.