Benchmarking Internet Progress: Analysis of FCC's Broadband Performance Data

This paper presents a novel longitudinal analysis of U.S. broadband performance trends from 2011 to 2023 using the Measuring Broadband America (MBA) dataset created and managed by the Federal Communications Commission. By systematically analyzing over a decade of actual user measurements, we quantify the evolution of key performance indicators including download and upload speeds, latency under load, along with their interquartile ranges (IQRs), providing the most comprehensive, empirically grounded portrait of broadband quality change available in the US to date. For example, we document the cumulative annual growth rates (CAGR) of median broadband service download speed of 20% (1.6 Mbps) for DSL, 30% (22 Mbps) for Cable, and 28% (28 Mbps) for Fiber systems between 2011 - 2023. Notably, between 2020 through July 2023, the CAGR in download speed for Fiber increased to 40% (73 Mbps) for Fiber. Our analysis indicates there may be some increase IQR for downstream and upstream speed across all DSL, Cable, and Fiber technologies over the 13-year study, meaning that there may have been an increase in the variability of broadband speeds across the middle 50% of users in the MBA program. We discuss the policy implications of these and other findings and make a concluding argument that as the FCC's MBA program was sunset in 2023, there is a strong need for the creation of a new open data platform to ensure that future broadband policy remains transparent, data-driven, and accountable. This study's data products and software artifacts are available to the research community at https://github.com/UCBoulder/bclear/tree/main.