The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will be giving away 10,000 Wireless-N routers as part of their program to perform a number of broadband tests, for the benefit of a better connection in the future.
They are striving to work on improving a number of issues including latency, packet loss, connection speeds and much more. Obviously the Internet is not all about just how fast you can download at. As mentioned on the site, many factors along the whole routing process can make a fast connection feel very slow. The main areas of focus include:
- Multi-threaded HTTP download speed test
- Multi-threaded HTTP based upload speed test
- Availability of the connection
- Jitter
- Latency (both ICMP and UDP)
- Packet loss (both ICMP and UDP)
- DNS query resolution time
- DNS query failure rate
- Web page loading time
- Web page loading failure rate
- Video streaming performance
They have extended their research efforts to the public, but there are some minor requirements which need to be met. For example, your connection must be consistent (suffer very few disconnections), users must be considered average Internet browsers and not heavy downloaders, and that you currently use a standalone device to connect to the web.
Most users may be eligible for one of 10,000 Netgear WNR3500L wireless routers, for use during the trial, and they will get to keep it one the test period is over, obviously for the time and effort invested.
