Why Is My Internet Slow?: Making Network Speeds Visible Marshini Chetty1, David Haslem2, Andrew Baird3, Ugochi Ofoha1, Bethany Sumner1 and Rebecca E. Grinter1 Georgia Institute of Technology1 Orange Sparkle Ball2 Amazon3 {marshini, uofoha3, bsumner8, beki}
[email protected] [email protected] @gatech.edu ABSTRACT Regardless of which side of the debate one is on, regulators, With widespread broadband adoption, more households companies, and consumer groups agree that users need report experiencing sub-optimal speeds. Not only are slow visibility into what performance the ISP is actually speeds frustrating, they may indicate consumers are not delivering for various services [17-18]. receiving the services they are paying for from their internet service providers. Yet, determining the speed and source of For these reasons, households require tools to help them slow-downs is difficult because few tools exist for determine their internet speed, diagnose a slow connection broadband management. We report on results of a field trial and take action to rectify the problem [8]. Our research with 10 households using a visual network probe designed goals were to make home broadband speeds visible and to address these problems. We describe the results of the manageable for users and to study how this informs their study and provide design implications for future tools. thinking. To this end, we created a probe called Kermit to More importantly, we argue that tools like this can educate show householders factors causing internet slow-downs. In and empower consumers by making broadband speeds and this paper, we describe results from a field trial of Kermit sources of slow-downs more visible.