{"69121":{"#nid":"69121","#data":{"type":"news","title":"Georgia Tech Proposes Internet Consumer Nutrition Label","body":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EWhen it comes to broadband speeds, U.S. Internet service providers (ISPs) largely deliver on their promises, says a report issued today by the Federal Communications Commission, but \u201cthroughput\u201d is only one of several metrics listed in the report that affect network performance. ISPs should provide a broadband \u201cnutrition label\u201d\u2014easy-to-understand information about service-limiting factors\u2014and users need better ways of measuring the performance their ISPs are delivering, concludes a study from the Georgia Tech College of Computing.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EOut of some 2 billion Internet users worldwide, about 500 million are residential broadband users, and recent figures show that two-thirds of U.S. households are hooked up to high-speed Internet. Generally speaking, these customers\u2019 throughput\u2014the \u201cwidth\u201d of their Internet pipeline\u2014lives up to speeds advertised by their ISPs, says the FCC report, \u201cMeasuring Broadband America.\u201d But many home Internet users simultaneously run multiple applications that each use network resources, and the behavior of one application can affect the performance another application receives, says Nick Feamster, associate professor in the School of Computer Science.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u201cPeople should care about more than just throughput,\u201d Feamster says. \u201cOptimal network performance depends on several other factors, but measuring these important metrics and explaining them to consumers is challenging.\u0026nbsp; It goes back to transparency\u2014we want to give users the information that will help them make the best decisions about which service plan to purchase, and to give them ways to verify that they\u2019re getting the level of service that they\u2019re paying for.\u201d\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EFeamster and his Ph.D. student, Srikanth Sundaresan, consulted with the FCC on its study data, which were gathered from about 10,000 homes across the United States and involved many different ISPs. Their recommendations incorporated data from both the FCC study and from an independent study, Project BISMark (\u003Ca href=\u0022http:\/\/projectbismark.net\/\u0022 target=\u0022_blank\u0022\u003Ehttp:\/\/projectbismark.net\/\u003C\/a\u003E), a new open-source router platform that allows users to continuously monitor the performance that they are getting from their ISP.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EFor the initial BISMark study, Feamster and Sundaresan deployed network-measurement devices in 16 homes across three ISPs in the Atlanta metropolitan area. The recommendations are spelled out in the paper, \u201cBroadband Internet Performance: A View From the Gateway,\u201d to be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery\u2019s SIGCOMM 2011 conference, Aug. 15-19 in Toronto (visit the \u003Ca href=\u0022http:\/\/www.gtsigcomm.com\u0022 target=\u0022_blank\u0022\u003E#GTSIGCOMM\u003C\/a\u003E website to learn more). The home routers used in BISMark (as well as the platform source code) are available too; Feamster and Sundaresan have been shipping them to home users since early 2011. \u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u201cWe found that performance of U.S. ISPs more consistently matches their advertised promises than the ISPs in other countries\u2014they do a pretty good job,\u201d Feamster says. \u201cBut at the same time, those advertisements are based on performance metrics that don\u2019t tell the full story about how users\u2019 applications will actually perform. Throughput might have been the dominant metric when the debate was dial-up versus broadband, but it no longer gives the complete picture about application performance.\u201d\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EToday\u2019s broadband is fast and ubiquitous enough that most applications can function well on a fraction of the throughput that most service plans offer, Feamster explains. But when several applications or activities are using the network at the same time\u2014for example, a user might be streaming a high-definition movie while making a video call over Skype\u2014or when many other users are simultaneously on the network, that\u2019s when performance can suffer. Often the network gives preference to activities or users with the biggest bandwidth appetites and leaves the rest foraging for scraps.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EOne key factor is \u201clatency,\u201d a general term that refers to several kinds of delays incurred in the processing of network data. For instance, in the \u201clast mile\u201d of connectivity to a household\u2014the final leg of connectivity from the ISP to the home\u2014data errors and packet loss often crop up at a disproportionate rate, and these can significantly impair activities like streaming video or voice over IP services. To minimize this problem, ISPs often perform error correction in the last mile, which comes at the cost of some additional delay. \u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u201cThey\u2019re basically introducing a time lapse that, if you scaled it out to the appropriate physical distance, would equate to half the width of the country,\u201d Feamster says. \u201cSo, if you\u2019re a gamer and you chose your service plan based solely on throughput speed, you might not receive the level of service you expected.\u201d\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EFeamster and Sundaresan also found that certain cable and DSL modems can introduce excessive latency, depending on the activities and applications that users are performing in their homes.\u0026nbsp; \u201cAny user who has noticed that certain activities like uploading photos can render the network unusable has been a victim of excessive buffering, or \u2018bufferbloat,\u2019\u201d Feamster says.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EIn addition to proposing an Internet \u201cnutrition label\u201d that would detail network performance in terms of throughput, latency and other measurements, Feamster and Sundaresan have included mechanisms in the BISMark router to give priority to latency-sensitive applications like Skype so that they might function normally while their hungrier counterparts eat up the remaining bandwidth. If throughput can be thought of as the number of lanes on the Information superhighway, the new technique in the BISMark router provides an \u201cHOV lane\u201d for voice and video traffic, so that the real-time traffic doesn\u2019t get stuck waiting for your photos to finish uploading.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u201cConsumers need better tools for understanding whether their home network is performing as well as it should.\u0026nbsp; A major part of making this possible is giving users an easy way to monitor their home network activity and performance over time, which is our vision for the BISMark router,\u201d Feamster says. \u201cFor example, I can see that, in the past few days, the performance of my access ISP has been declining during peak hours.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u201cUltimately, we envision the platform enabling applications that solve a much wider range of problems,\u201d he continues, \u201csuch as giving users the ability to manage usage caps that ISPs are now instating, to implement parental controls or to diagnose performance problems inside the home itself.\u201d\u003C\/p\u003E","summary":null,"format":"limited_html"}],"field_subtitle":[{"value":"Researchers say consumers deserve more complete picture of service they receive."}],"field_summary":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EWhen it comes to broadband speeds, \nISPs should provide a broadband \u201cnutrition label\u201d\u2014easy-to-understand \ninformation about service-limiting factors\u2014and users need better ways of\n measuring the performance their ISPs are delivering, concludes a College of Computing study. \u003Cem\u003ESource: Office of Communications\u003C\/em\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"field_summary_sentence":[{"value":"Researchers say consumers deserve more complete picture of service they receive."}],"uid":"27174","created_gmt":"2011-08-02 10:01:24","changed_gmt":"2016-10-08 03:09:52","author":"Mike Terrazas","boilerplate_text":"","field_publication":"","field_article_url":"","dateline":{"date":"2011-08-02T00:00:00-04:00","iso_date":"2011-08-02T00:00:00-04:00","tz":"America\/New_York"},"extras":[],"hg_media":{"65456":{"id":"65456","type":"image","title":"Nick Feamster","body":null,"created":"1449176831","gmt_created":"2015-12-03 21:07:11","changed":"1475894579","gmt_changed":"2016-10-08 02:42:59","alt":"Nick Feamster","file":{"fid":"193222","name":"091201R007_0.jpg","image_path":"\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/091201R007_0.jpg","image_full_path":"http:\/\/www.tlwarc.hg.gatech.edu\/\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/091201R007_0.jpg","mime":"image\/jpeg","size":4993716,"path_740":"http:\/\/www.tlwarc.hg.gatech.edu\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/740xx_scale\/public\/images\/091201R007_0.jpg?itok=Ic7pXWaY"}}},"media_ids":["65456"],"groups":[{"id":"47223","name":"College of Computing"}],"categories":[{"id":"153","name":"Computer Science\/Information Technology and Security"}],"keywords":[{"id":"3388","name":"Broadband"},{"id":"4139","name":"consumer"},{"id":"13710","name":"internet performance"},{"id":"10637","name":"nick feamster"}],"core_research_areas":[],"news_room_topics":[],"event_categories":[],"invited_audience":[],"affiliations":[],"classification":[],"areas_of_expertise":[],"news_and_recent_appearances":[],"phone":[],"contact":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EBrendan Streich\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E404-894-7253\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"email":["bstreich@cc.gatech.edu"],"slides":[],"orientation":[],"userdata":""}}}