Robust and Extensible Measurement of Broadband Plans with BQT+

TL;DR

BQT+ is a flexible framework for measuring broadband plans that adapts to interface changes, enabling longitudinal monitoring and policy analysis across many ISPs with minimal technical effort.

Contribution

It introduces a declarative, automaton-based approach to broadband data collection that is robust, extensible, and easy to adapt to interface evolutions.

Findings

Supports longitudinal monitoring of 64 ISPs

Enables policy studies across 124,000 addresses

Maintains low technical overhead for users

Abstract

Independent, street address-level broadband data is essential for evaluating Internet infrastructure investments, such as the $42B Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program. Evaluating these investments requires longitudinal visibility into broadband availability, quality, and affordability, including data on pre-disbursement baselines and changes in providers' advertised plans. While such data can be obtained through Internet Service Provider (ISP) web interfaces, these workloads impose three fundamental system requirements: robustness to frequent interface evolution, extensibility across hundreds of providers, and low technical overhead for non-expert users. Existing systems fail to meet these three essential requirements. We present BQT+, a broadband plan measurement framework that replaces monolithic workflows with declarative state/action specifications. BQT+ models querying intent as an interaction state space, formalized as an abstract nondeterministic finite automaton (NFA), and selects execution paths at runtime to accommodate alternative interaction flows and localized interface changes. We show that BQT+ sustains longitudinal monitoring of 64 ISPs, supporting querying for over 100 ISPs. We apply it to two policy studies: constructing a BEAD pre-disbursement baseline and benchmarking broadband affordability across over 124,000 addresses in four states.