The FCC is asking for a good way for consumers to monitor broadband performance and they have put out a public Request For Quotation (RFQ).  Well I’m going to suggest a more granular and complete method of network monitoring that doesn’t generate unnecessary traffic on the network, and one that does not require any third party tools to collect the information.  The current methods of installing Java and/or other tools and using small active measurement samples is inferior.

Every modern Operating System (OS) has built in passive monitoring and logging capability which can measure real-time performance, and it can measure second-by-second performance data and for any specified duration e.g., 1 hour to 1 month.  I’ve provided a detailed sample of what I can graph in Figure 1, and it reveals everything about my the network interface performance in my computer which tells me a lot about my broadband service and the sites I visit.

Figure 1 – Broadband performance monitor in Windows (click to enlarge)

I found that YouTube tends to burst to maximum download speeds to cache ahead which causes enough jitter that my Lingo VoIP telephony service drops inbound audio.  Hulu.com on the other hand does slight buffering but mostly hovers at 0.6 Mbps which is the quality of their 480P video streams.  Now this doesn’t mean my broadband service is capped at 0.6 Mbps; only that Hulu caps the download on the server end to conserve bandwidth.  Google on the other hand prefers to burst YouTube most of the time.

The detail of the graph goes down to second-by-second accuracy, and a few days worth of data can be zipped up in to a few megabytes which can be aggregated and graphed.  This is vastly superior to an occasional 1 minute measurement on SpeedTest.net because this actually shows you the throughput you’re getting on your present websites.

The logging in Windows Vista for example can easily be set up using the Reliability and Performance Monitor.  Simply right click on “Network” as shown in Figure 2 and create a new Data Collector.  You can even download this template (unzip first) to import.  Note that it only outputs a raw CSV text file and the bandwidth needs to be converted from bytes/second to megabits/second.

Figure 2 – Reliability and Performance Monitor

Mac users can use the sar command to do something similar.  Of course this is just a sample of what can be done, and it could be automated to a few clicks for large scale data collection.

Better yet, just about any wired broadband provider can offer second by second (or 5-second resolution) graphs of each subscriber or create a web portal that would automatically show the port usage based on source IP address.