| Abstract | We present the first study of network access link performance mea-sured directly from home gateway devices. Policymakers, ISPs,
and users are increasingly interested in studying the performance
of Internet access links. Because of many confounding factors in a
home network or on end hosts, however, thoroughly understanding
access network performance requires deploying measurement in-
frastructure in users’ homes as gateway devices. In conjunction
with the Federal Communication Commission’s study of broad-
band Internet access in the United States, we study the throughput
and latency of network access links using longitudinal measure-
ments from nearly 4,000 gateway devices across 8 ISPs from a de-
ployment of over 4,200 devices. We study the performance users
achieve and how various factors ranging from the user’s choice of
modem to the ISP’s traffic shaping policies can affect performance.
Our study yields many important findings about the characteristics
of existing access networks. Our findings also provide insights into
the ways that access network performance should be measured and
presented to users, which can help inform ongoing broader efforts
to benchmark the performance of access networks.
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