A Longitudinal Study of the Prevalence of WiFi Bottlenecks in Home Access Networks
Ranya Sharma, Nick Feamster, Marc Richardson · 2024
Although home wireless networks (WiFi) are increasingly becoming performance bottlenecks, there are no research studies based on long-running field deployments that document this phenomenon. Given both public and private investment in broadband Internet infrastructure, a rigorous study of this phenomenon---and accompanying public data, based on open-source methods, is critical. To this end, this study pioneers a system and measurement technique to directly assess WiFi and access network performance. This study is first to continuously and contemporaneously measure Internet performance along two segments---the wireless client to the access point, and from the access point to the ISP access network. It is also the largest and longest-running study of its kind, with public data spanning more than two years (and counting), and, to our knowledge, the first such study in nearly a decade. Our study is based on data from over 22,000 joint measurements across more than 50 broadband access networks. Our findings have important implications for both the development of access technologies and Internet policy. Notably, for users with access links that exceed 800~Mbps, the user's wireless network was the performance bottleneck 100% of the time. Such inflection points will continue to evolve, yet the contributions of this paper include not only the results, but also open-source tools, data, and ongoing continuous measurements.