Measuring Broadband America Mobile Data

Measuring Broadband America (MBA) is an ongoing, rigorous nationwide study of consumer broadband performance in the United States. In September 2012, the FCC expanded the program to include information on mobile broadband service performance in the United States. The program uses the FCC Speed Test app for Android and iPhone devices to test the performance of volunteers' smartphone mobile broadband services. The FCC Speed Test App collects broadband performance data that includes upload and download speed, latency and packet loss, as well as the wireless performance characteristics of the broadband connection and the kind of handsets and versions of operating systems tested.

De-Identified Data Available to the Public - Coarsened Data

The MBA Program's policy of openness and transparency includes the public description and availability of the mechanisms, methodology, and data produced by the study. The FCC periodically releases all data collected through the program as part of unaudited data sets. Such data is provided "as is" with the FCC making no assertion as to the quality of such data. Specifically, the extensive integrity checking that is performed preparing data for Commission reports during both the collection and in post-collection data analysis and processing has not been performed on this raw collected data. Because such necessary auditing of data is not performed on non-report data, the data is unsuitable for FCC use in comparing ISP performance. At the present time there are no plans for a mobile broadband performance report, but the FCC recognizes that this data collected with the aid of a volunteer community can have value to the research community and others interested in broadband network performance, and releases it for this purpose.

The MBA Program takes strong measures to ensure the privacy and confidentiality of volunteers. Consistent with the program’s privacy policy, any data that could potentially be used to identify a particular device or person are processed in a way to minimize the risks to a subscriber’s privacy interests. Our data analysis and processing to identify and mitigate such potential risks of exposing personally identifiable information is described in the 2016 Mobile Measurement Open Data Release Technical Description and 2018 Mobile Measurement Open Data Release Technical Description Addendum. The most up-to-date information about the FCC Speed Test app’s system architecture, data collection methodology, and functionalities are provided in the 2021 FCC Speed Test App Technical Description. The MBA Program's Mobile Broadband Performance Application Privacy Notice and Terms of Use and extensive privacy related analysis and discussions that support this release may be found by searching the General Docket No. 12-264 using the FCC’s Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS) for summaries of past meetings beginning in December 2012.

The coarsening method used for mobile data provided after the second quarter of 2018 has been modified. Changes that vary from the technical data guides are identified in the read-me files that are included with the data set.