Udit Paul, Jiamo Liu, Arpit Gupta and Elizabeth Belding receive Best Long Paper Award at ACM Internet Measurement Conference 2022

Udit Paul, Jiamo Liu, Professor Arpit Gupta and Professor Elizabeth Belding's paper, "The Importance of Contextualization of Crowdsourced Active Speed Test Measurements", has been awarded the Best (Long) Paper Award at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference 2022 (IMC 2022).

Professor Belding summarized their paper as follows: 

"This work is timely given the recent focus on crowdsourced speed test measurements for policy-related decision-making. Our paper argues that using these measurements without understanding their context is problematic. Though the community had internalized that speed-test results can be misleading, no one knew the extent of skews in such crowdsourced datasets. One significant roadblock in contextualizing these measurements was to infer their subscription tier (10 Mbps vs. 100 Mbps plan). A speed test result of 10 Mbps is just fine if the user subscribed to a 10 Mbps plan, but it is quite problematic if it subscribed to a 100 Mbps plan. We developed a novel BST methodology that infers the subscription tier for crowdsourced measurements. Applying this methodology, we quantify the skews in public (FCC’s MBA, M-Lab) and private (Ookla) crowdsourced datasets. Our analysis shows how lack of context contributes to misleading conclusions. For instance, the connection type (Ethernet vs. WiFi), the WiFi band and signal strength, the end-user device resources, and even the specific speed test vendor (Ookla or M-Lab) all significantly impact the performance that is achieved. We conclude with a set of recommendations for speed test vendors and the FCC to contextualize speed test data and correctly interpret measured performance. Thank you to Ookla for Good at Ookla, Measurement Lab, Zillow and NSF for supporting our work."

Read the full paper here.

The ACM Internet Measurement Conference entails three days of internet measurement and analysis focused discussion. The papers presented at this conference are intended to build the current knowledge base of Internet behavior, as well as collection and analysis of Internet measurements.

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