Front end for broadband testing app - Timely with federal broadband efforts!

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There is currently a massive discrepancy in broadband speeds available to people in the United States. Some people have blazing fast internet speeds, while others don’t even meet the minimum requirements needed for full connectivity in the digital age. To solve this issue, the U.S. government designated The Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (B.E.A.D.) Program to provide funding for the development and deployment of internet related infrastructure in order to provide for people who are underserved when it comes to broadband connectivity. The B.E.A.D. program allocates contracts and funding to private companies in exchange for infrastructure development within these underserved areas. There is however a massive problem, a problem our project helps to correct: according to our project sponsor and leader of PAgCASA Jim Cupples, Internet Service Providers are taking governmental funding in exchange for agreeing to provide services to underserved areas but they are failing to deliver this broadband service they are obligated to provide. Both in general coverage as well as speed, ISPs are misleading the Government and Public, essentially lying about the services they provide. Our project wants to help correct this issue by providing a website which will host a web application whose purpose is to illustrate the tested speeds (taken from in-person testing) in order to challenge the alleged speeds given by the ISPs. This illustration will take the shape of an interactive map of the U.S. which will graph the data of tested broadband connections provided by ISPs. Our project providers will use this application to help them determine problem areas. Unfortunately, 22.3 percent of Americans in rural areas and 27.7 percent of Americans in tribal lands lack coverage from fixed terrestrial 25/3 Mbps broadband. Within these communities, individuals are being cheated out of the proclaimed “fast internet” because their provider can’t extend their coverage into rural communities. This practice is known as digital discrimination. The FCC is actively pushing for fair and even coverage throughout the United States in order to prevent certain parts of the U.S. to be shined away from modern-day speeds. Specifically, the task force will focus on creating policies prohibiting broadband deployment discrimination based on income, racial or ethnic composition, and other agency-determined relevant factors of a community. Companies like PAgCasa are on a mission to test these theories out with hardware that eliminates almost all variances and variability. Their devices are meant to be plugged into the source and tested for speed without having to worry much about Wi-Fi traffic. From there, data is extracted from these tests to curate data points on maps to show a visualization of how different communities in the United States are underserved in terms of broadband connectivity. From there, individuals can utilize and present the data from these points to take action at the state or federal level. More than 18 million Americans lack access to high-speed internet, many of them in rural areas where homes and businesses are spread far apart [3]. It would be unfair for people who vacate these areas to have a significant disadvantage in having reliable and fast broadband access. The reason for the disseminated and lackluster coverage throughout the United States is because of the operating costs and company greed. It would not make monetary sense for companies to invest in towers and more resources in an area that wouldn’t use it as much - where the demand and therefore money isn’t as large. It’s a business tactic to essentially avoid spending when it is not needed. Which is wrongful because these companies are taking Government money which is intended to be used for these under-served areas. If these private companies are being funded by Governmental tax dollars meant to provide for the underprivileged, but are instead pocketing this money and using it elsewhere that is a wrongful act and must be fought against. Our project seeks to help eliminate this corruption by providing easy access to highly informative graphs and organized lists whose purpose is to demonstrate the discrepancy between an ISP’s reported provided broadband speed and what is actually being delivered. This will help expose any place where an ISP is lying about the speeds provided. In order to establish a website that harvests data from real-world testing, we have to ensure that the data being inputted into the database is correctly and understandably valid. To cover the emphasis of the validity, we will have on-site user testing phase with full hardware prototypes that harvests broadband speeds and information of the site. From there, the data will be transported onto a Google Cloud Platform Bucket where the automation of the data-scraping process will ensue to the front-end of our website. The results would indicate that further testing would be needed to fully understand the boundaries of the communities that are suffering from broadband discrimination. We acknowledge that the testing phase shall yield unexpecting results, but we plan on being transparent and inputting all results from the GCP bucket in order to display a quality and correct map describing the national bandwidth speeds and access.

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Artifacts

Name Description
Dell EMC Networking VEP1425N This hardware is used to generate speed test data in rural and agriculture communities. The Dell brand is faster and has more memory than competing devices. After the tests are gathered, it will be visualized (our job) on a website to see which communities are underserved in America. Underserved broadbands are speeds under the federal minimum, which is 25Mbps download and 3Mbps upload. Per PAgCASA: We would tell people to email us the results of their speed tests, and if the tests were below the federal thresholds, we would ask for what kind of package they were paying for. When we could determine that they were the appropriate customer (and not getting what they were paying for, we would drop off a device for either them to hook up, or I would hook it up in their house for them. We would usually run four tests a day for four days, and whatever the results we knew that all of the results from the device were correct. Most speed tests are done wrong because they are performed by people, and people fail to do things like turn off other devices, or hook directly up to their router. By installing a programmed device that runs four times a day in the background, we can be sure of the actual results.   Download