It would mean the FCC would have to have direct access to the last mile. Possible, I suppose, but asking consumers to get that data is probably easier.
The telecos all have tools for network analysis. They're actually pretty decent tools, for the most part. The telecos collect a lot of the bandwidth data for the last mile. All the telecos have to do is provide mean and variance per week of the data they already have for each central office. By making it for the entire CO, there's no privacy concerns, and it's ample for detecting if there's a serious issue. (You want a week to handle minor outage issues that don't seriously impact usage.)
I'd start with minimum standards (Score:5, Insightful)
The minimum standard that should be expected by carrier-grade services (which, by definition, carriers should manage) is five nines reliability.
Metronet connections should be one gigabit, minimum. Rural nets should be 10 megabits or better. Ideally a lot better.
Users shouldn't need to measure speed, the FCC should be imposing minimum conditions and policing it.
Re:I'd start with minimum standards (Score:3)
It would mean the FCC would have to have direct access to the last mile. Possible, I suppose, but asking consumers to get that data is probably easier.
Re: (Score:2)
The telecos all have tools for network analysis. They're actually pretty decent tools, for the most part. The telecos collect a lot of the bandwidth data for the last mile. All the telecos have to do is provide mean and variance per week of the data they already have for each central office. By making it for the entire CO, there's no privacy concerns, and it's ample for detecting if there's a serious issue. (You want a week to handle minor outage issues that don't seriously impact usage.)