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Comment by singlow | Hacker News Reader

Is Ookla an official data source for the RDOF evaluation? How does Ookla know what the average speed is? It only knows the average speed of users that do a speed test and most people only do it when they are suspicious of a problem or testing a new setup that is likely not yet fully configured. Typically I use it when I am installing new hardware and I might get 10 bad results and then 1 good result. Once I get the good result I stop. 100 days go by that I don't need to check it at all until I have a slow connection and then I do a speed check and see that it is slow. Seems like it would be highly biased towards testing under the poorest conditions.

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There isn't an "official data source" for RDOF evaluation. ISPs are required to carry out measurements in the markets where they've accepted funds. Measurements are carried out on a sampled subset of their customers, and a large set of frequent measurements has to be produced from each customer. Measurements have to be conducted to servers in specific locations (you can't just test to a server two miles down the road inside the ISP's network). The requirements are pretty rigorous and not straightforward to meet (e.g. if a customer switches their router off for a day, then that can disqualify their measurements entirely - you need a sample every hour, every day for at least a week in the quarter). They need to submit these measurements to USAC at the end of the quarter, to demonstrate that at least X% of measurements met the target of Y (it varies by metric).

Generally speaking, crowdsourced measurements (whereby you have loads of users but each running very few tests) aren't well suited to these requirements.

I'm oversimplifying things here, but more details on the requirements can be found at https://www.usac.org/high-cost/annual-requirements/performan...

Source: I work in this space

SamKnows is what many ISPs use for this. The parent comment is Sam, and he Knows.

No, in b2b setting, checking internet speed happens on regular bases in order to monitor network performance or to confirm compliance with the SLA. Have you ever wondered how they do their money when the browser test is free?

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