A Metric for the Fair Comparison of ISPs

Abstract

Comparing Internet Service Providers (ISP) can be a daunting task because of the many options available as well as the fact that what is advertised may not actually be delivered. Instead of trying to compare a wide range of options we instead focus on the ability of an ISP to provide one service, namely internet service, at a competitive price. This requires extracting the price to be paid if only internet access was provided (i.e., no phone or TV options) and determining the throughput that the customer actually achieves. We then use this information to estimate the price that the customer would have to pay to achieve a rate of 50 Mbps. This performance metric takes into account the ISP’s pricing but it also includes an adjustment based on how well the advertised bandwidth is achieved. We obtain the pricing information directly from the ISP and we obtain the achieved rate for a given advertised rate from customers of the ISP. In order to only take into account data we can trust, we also briefly present a trust framework that we are using for crowd-sourced data. In this framework new users are added to the platform and can contribute data only when at least one of the users already on the platform can vouch for them.