Helping users shop for ISPs with internet nutrition labels

Sundaresan, S., Feamster, N., Teixeira, R., Tang, A., Edwards, W., Grinter, R., Chetty, M., and de Donato, W. (2011). Helping users shop for ISPs with internet nutrition labels. In HomeNets '11: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Home networks, 13--18.

Abstract

When purchasing home broadband access from Internet service providers (ISPs), users must decide which service plans are most appropriate for their needs. Today, ISPs advertise their available service plans using only generic upload and download speeds. Unfortunately, these metrics do not always accurately reflect the varying performance that home users will experience for a wide range of applications. In this paper, we propose that each ISP service plan carry a "nutrition label" that conveys more comprehensive information about network metrics along many dimensions, including various aspects of throughput, latency, loss rate, and jitter. We first justify why these metrics should form the basis of a network nutrition label. Then, we demonstrate that current plans that are superficially similar with respect to advertised download rates may have different performance according to the label metrics. We close with a discussion of the challenges involved in presenting a nutrition label to users in a way that is both accurate and easy to understand.

Materials

PDF File (http://hcitang.org/papers/2011-homenets2011-internetnutritionlabels.pdf)
DOI (http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2018567.2018571)

Keywords

access networks, broadband networks, BISMark, benchmarking

BibTeX

@inproceedings{sundaresan2011helping,
  year = {2011},
  type = {conference},
  title = {Helping users shop for ISPs with internet nutrition labels},
  publisher = {ACM},
  pdfurl = {http://hcitang.org/papers/2011-homenets2011-internetnutritionlabels.pdf},
  pages = {13--18},
  location = {Toronto, Ontario, Canada},
  keywords = {access networks, broadband networks, BISMark, benchmarking},
  isbn = {978-1-4503-0798-7},
  doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2018567.2018571},
  date-modified = {2014-01-17 04:40:29 +0000},
  booktitle = {HomeNets '11: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Home
networks},
  author = {Sundaresan, Srikanth and Feamster, Nick and Teixeira, Renata and Tang,
Anthony and Edwards, W. Keith and Grinter, Rebecca E. and Chetty, Marshini
and de Donato, Walter},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  abstract = {When purchasing home broadband access from Internet service providers
(ISPs), users must decide which service plans are most appropriate for their
needs. Today, ISPs advertise their available service plans using only generic
upload and download speeds. Unfortunately, these metrics do not always accurately
reflect the varying performance that home users will experience for a wide
range of applications. In this paper, we propose that each ISP service plan
carry a "nutrition label" that conveys more comprehensive information about
network metrics along many dimensions, including various aspects of throughput,
latency, loss rate, and jitter. We first justify why these metrics should form
the basis of a network nutrition label. Then, we demonstrate that current plans
that are superficially similar with respect to advertised download rates may
have different performance according to the label metrics. We close with a
discussion of the challenges involved in presenting a nutrition label to users
in a way that is both accurate and easy to understand.},
}