DATA UNDERLYING BROADBAND-SPEED GAPFOUND BY COMMISSION ARE CHALLENGED

摘要

ComScore broadband test results understate the speeds offered by ISPs, the NCTA said in a letter to the chief of the FCC's Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau. "The comScore data cited in the plan suffers from a variety of problems and should not serve as the basis for concluding that there is such a significant gap between maximum speeds and 'actual' speeds," NCTA Vice President Neal Goldberg wrote Joel Gurin, the chief of the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau. The problems in data collection include rounding off the size of a megabyte, using only one TCP connection in speed tests and not taking account of constrained resources on users' computers, the report said. "All the data gathering errors result in an underreporting of the actual speed delivered by an ISP on its network, and the individual errors create a compounding effect when aggregated in an individual subscriber's speed measurement," the study said. "The result is that the actual speed delivered by each ISP tested is higher than the comScore reported speed for each result of every test." A problem with the way that comScore identifies which ISP tier its testers subscribe to further overstates the disparity between the speeds advertised and those delivered, the report found.