Comparing Broadband ISP Performance using Big Data from M-Lab

TL;DR

This paper develops a causal inference-based framework to compare broadband ISP performance using large-scale M-Lab data, addressing biases and revealing more accurate performance differences.

Contribution

It introduces a novel data preprocessing and visualization tool, applies multi-variate matching to reduce bias, and refines performance estimation methods for unbiased ISP comparison.

Findings

ISPs are more similar in performance than previously thought.

Biases due to subscriber attributes significantly affect performance comparisons.

Refined models provide more accurate ISP rankings.

Abstract

Comparing ISPs on broadband speed is challenging, since measurements can vary due to subscriber attributes such as operation system and test conditions such as access capacity, server distance, TCP window size, time-of-day, and network segment size. In this paper, we draw inspiration from observational studies in medicine, which face a similar challenge in comparing the effect of treatments on patients with diverse characteristics, and have successfully tackled this using "causal inference" techniques for {\em post facto} analysis of medical records. Our first contribution is to develop a tool to pre-process and visualize the millions of data points in M-Lab at various time- and space-granularities to get preliminary insights on factors affecting broadband performance. Next, we analyze 24 months of data pertaining to twelve ISPs across three countries, and demonstrate that there is observational bias in the data due to disparities amongst ISPs in their attribute distributions. For our third contribution, we apply a multi-variate matching method to identify suitable cohorts that can be compared without bias, which reveals that ISPs are closer in performance than thought before. Our final contribution is to refine our model by developing a method for estimating speed-tier and re-apply matching for comparison of ISP performance. Our results challenge conventional rankings of ISPs, and pave the way towards data-driven approaches for unbiased comparisons of ISPs world-wide.