Benchmarks or Equity? A New Approach to Measuring Internet Performance

A longstanding approach to measuring Internet performance is to directly compare throughput against pre-defined benchmarks (e.g., 25 Mbps downstream, 3 Mbps upstream). In this paper, we advocate, develop, and demonstrate a different approach: rather than focusing on whether speeds meet a particular threshold, we develop techniques to determine whether a variety of Internet performance metrics (including throughput, latency, and loss rate) are comparable across geographies. We define these metrics and apply them across a longitudinal dataset of Internet performance measurements comprising approximately 30 neighborhoods across the City of Chicago (IL). The idea of ”digital redlining” raises questions about whether Internet infrastructure provides equity to users in different geographic locations, or if the stratified patterns long observed in housing, public education, transportation, environmental toxins, and more might also be observed in Internet performance. Results show that there are important differences between Internet measurements taken from households in these three groups. The South Shore neighborhood, on the city’s historically Black South Side, shows consistently worse performance than the Logan Square neighborhood, on the city’s North Side.