Marc Richardson

If you’re frustrated with the speed of your home Internet, what can you do to improve it? Before making the leap to a new provider or absorbing the often difficult-to-swallow costs of a high-speed service plan, you might want to consider another culprit of slow Internet: your WiFi connection. WiFi connection performance is determined by factors independent of your access connection, while the access connection performance is (primarily) determined by the specific service contract you purchase from a service provider (ISP).

In an effort to expand Internet access, local and federal policymakers have sought to use speed test data to determine where to allocate funding.

A longstanding approach to measuring Internet performance is to directly compare throughput against pre-defined benchmarks (e.g., 25 Mbps downstream, 3 Mbps upstream).