Thursday, March 11th, 2010
By the Staff of BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, March 11, 2010 – The FCC launched its
consumer broadband test today, enabling consumers to test the speed and other performance measurements of their broadband connections.
Users will randomly be assigned to one of two speed and measurement tests when they visit www.broadband.gov. One of the tests will utilize the open source Network Diagnostic Tool (NDT) developed by Internet2, a consortium of researchers.
BroadbandCensus.com has been using the NDT speed test since February 2008.
The other test, uses Ookla, Inc.'s
Speedtest.net, has been used by Communications Workers of America's
SpeedMatters.org web site since 2007.
“Transparency empowers consumers, promotes innovation and investment, and encourages competition,” said Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski.
“The FCC’s new digital tools will arm users with real-time information about their broadband connection and the agency with useful data about service across the country," he said. "By informing consumers about their broadband service quality, these tools help eliminate confusion and make the market work more effectively.”
The FCC also said that it did not endorse any specific testing application.
In addition to the "Consumer Broadband Test," the FCC on Thursday also launched a mobile application -- a first for the agency...
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Sunday, July 19th, 2009
By Drew Clark, Editor and Executive Director, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, July 19, 2009 - Over at
O'Reilly's Radar, Carl Malamud discusses the need for a crowdsourced national communiations census, or a broadband census.
He writes:
My last tour of duty in DC was Chief Technology Officer at the Center for American Progress. One of the fun things I got to do was figure out what everybody else did, including my fellow Senior Fellows, the folks that generated most of the policy work, many of whom are now occupying senior posts in the new administration.
One of the most fascinating was Mark Lloyd. An experienced Emmy-winning television producer, communications lawyer, and community activist, Mark is the author of a well-regarded book aboutcommunications and democracy and numerous columns. He's currently at the Leadership Conference for Civil Rights.
The project Mark Lloyd was working on was a National Broadband Map to show our true communications capabilities. And, he wanted to crowd-source the map from community groups, supplementing that with census and other data from several different places to create a big mash-up. This was in 2005, around the same time Adrian Holovaty was thinking about chicagocrime.org.
Here's my reply on the O'Reilly...
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