Often times, we work in collaborative environments, like offices, schools, and shared spaces. Many with shared digital resources, especially internet connections. Students have a need to connect with their professors and online resources to learn material and try their knowledge of said materials. Office workers rely on internet communications to share information between departments, and within departments.
When many people use a single internet connection, the encompassing bandwidth and speed has detrimental diminishing effects on productivity, and can further restrict peoples’ ability to collaborate on products, research, and works. An important eye has been brought upon the Internet from the current pandemic.
What happened, and who is affected?
Within the past year, we’ve seen unprecedented dependence upon digital mediums for education, work, and recreation. All of this has shown us that the existing system for internet has partially been able to withstand the massive influx of online requirements for everyday life, and partially unable to work for everyone. Internet Service Providers are inherently to blame for inappropriately restrictive service, alongside poor bandwidth and speeds for the heightened requirements that physical isolation has brought to us.
These requirements of the brought to light the issues with our nation’s existing connection problems. Employees of all varieties found their need to work from home to show the reliance upon mobile devices increased, even as a trend from years prior.
Where does this impact people?
While netizens exists all around the globe, the population that are the focus of the problem here reside more so in the rural regions of the United States. Rural regions have less options for connectivity, and reduced bandwith of connectivity. Thus, having more devices and people connecting to the world through unbalanced and poor connections result in people being at a severe disadvantage for having opportunities available to them.
Why does this problem exist?
Internet Service Providers, commonly refered to as ISPs, have restrictions and unfair practices that prevent people in specific geographic regions from having full, easy, and unrestricted access to the internet. These ISPs, due to a sparser population in rual areas have a reduced potential revenue, whilst requiring generally more expenses for the expansion of internet in rural areas. Urban areas can makeup for the expenses due to the larger potential revenue of a larger population.
The following graph showcases the coverage of the United States’ four major telecom carriers.
This graph is representative of the land area of the 3G and 4G data coverage of the four major telecom carriers in the United States. While 4G coverage among the four is outnumbering 3G, the individual companies have significant land area that is solely 3G coverage, and the infrastructure that this supports is not enough to provide sufficient access to the necessary resources for our digital world.
Cell phones have vastly expanded to nearly all Americans, and as the graph above shows, Smartphones too have ownership among three quarters of all Americans, with an ever increasing upward trend. For comparison, below is a graph of American adult ownership of non-cellular devices.
As evident by the two graphs, the trend of widespread adoption of mobile devices show that phone ownership has transformed the method of which most adults connect to the internet. Desktop and laptop computers have remained steady at three quarters adoption, whilst being surpassed by cell phones fourteen years ago, and by smartphones four years ago.
This demographic change also skews in favor of adults who reside in urban regions than those that live in rural areas of America.
Internet Speed Checker is a tool that tests the speed and stability of a connection between a user’s device and a specified destination server.
Measuring download and upload speeds are the key goals of our project. Although, we also have the secondary plan to test connection latency to test the reliability of a connection. The services that we are using to interface provide options to pass through to the end user, enabling different tests and a variety of selections that allow for them to select multiple connections and many providers.
The library that we decided to rely on for our application is JSpeedTest, an open source Speed Test library, built for Android.
Our Web-based Application uses Fast-SpeedTest-API, developed by Fast.com, a subsidiary of Netflix, whose API is primarily designed to ensure that a network connection has sufficient bandwidth and speed for high quality video streaming.
With this, our application should enable users to be able to test against their ISP, and compare to other providers. With the ability to measure and relate their speed in an accurate manner that not only isn’t filtered by ISPs and not paid for by the ISPs, allows for true speeds to be measured.
However, this is only touching the tip of the iceberg. To truly resolve issues with ISPs and lackluster performance of the necessity that an internet connection has become, regulatory changes to ISPs needs to happen. The overall achievement of the project is to highlight these needs, and help push for change.