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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for chromas

Your Internet Provider Likely Juiced Its Official Speed Scores

Companies wield tremendous influence over the [FCC's internet speeds] study and often employ tactics to boost their scores, according to interviews with more than two dozen industry executives, engineers and government officials. As a result, the FCC's report likely gives consumers an unreliable measure of internet providers' performances by overstating speeds.

[...] The FCC informs companies which customers are part of the speed tests, allowing some to prioritize giving those households better service, engineers who worked at some of the companies said. The FCC relies on companies to provide information about the speed plans for the customers being tested.

Major providers have persuaded the FCC to remove unfavorable data, including individual houses with poor scores, blaming faulty equipment. They have successfully argued to exclude test days when heavy traffic slowed scores, such as during NFL games or when pushed a new software update. Reasons for the deletions aren't always included in the FCC reports.

Many internet providers gain additional information about the users being tested by paying SamKnows, the U.K.-based company that administers and provides equipment for the tests, for real-time access to testers' scores year-round, and other analytics.

Representatives of major broadband providers denied tampering with the FCC study, pointing to a code of conduct they sign that forbids them from influencing the results unless it is "consistent with normal business practices." They said any network upgrades improved service for swaths of their subscribers, not just households in the FCC's tests.

AT&T said that in its case, the company asked the FCC to remove DSL data from the report because it no longer markets that older technology, which relies on copper phone lines, used by a small percentage of its customer base. The company said the commission's own policies should have excluded the "obsolete" internet plans. AT&T also said that it did validate the DSL accounts for the FCC.

An FCC spokesman said the program has a transparent process and that the agency will continue to enable it "to improve, evolve, and provide meaningful results as we move forward."

Original Submission