What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Telecom/5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Revolutionizing Network Connectivity: Ookla's Speedtest Innovations, Emergency Resilience, and Future Insights
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Ever wondered how your internet connection could be faster and more reliable? Join me in a conversation with Bryan Darr, VP of Government Affairs at Ookla, as we explore the cutting-edge tools and technologies making this possible. Bryan walks us through the incredible journey of Ookla, their acquisition of Mosaic, and the global impact of their tools like Speedtest, DownDetector, RootMetrics, and EchoHau. With over 650 million installations worldwide, we also dive into federal funding programs like BEAD, which aim to bridge the digital divide in underserved areas.
What happens to your internet during a natural disaster? Reflecting on recent calamities such as the hurricane in Puerto Rico and the wildfires in Lahaina, Hawaii, we discuss how power outages and connectivity loss affect communities. You'll learn how valuable data from speed tests and mobile applications provide critical insights into network performance and resilience. We also highlight the life-saving roles of emergency networks like Starlink and FirstNet, which restore communication for first responders when it matters most.
Get ready for a sneak peek into the future of network testing! Evan shares the challenges and exciting opportunities following Ookla's acquisition spree, and the launch of Speedtest Insights—a comprehensive portal for analyzing network performance. Plus, don’t miss out on the Speedtest Awards, which recognize the best networks across the globe and set industry standards. As we wrap up, we look ahead to Ookla’s ambitious initiatives and the transformative power of data analytics in enhancing our connectivity experience. This episode is packed with insights you won't want to miss!
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everybody, fascinating chat today, as we dive into the world of how data is shaping the future of connectivity and broadband expansion, with a true expert in the field, brian at Ookla. How are you?
Speaker 2:Excellent, Evan. Thank you for inviting me today.
Speaker 1:Well, thanks for being here. I've been a big fan of you guys for many years, in particular Speedtest by Ookla, which I seem to use daily. Maybe introduce yourself and the team and vision behind Ookla and Speedtest.
Speaker 2:VP of Government Affairs for Ookla. I've been here for six years. They actually acquired my company, which was called Mosaic, back in 2018. So I've been in the industry overall for well. Let's just say more than 30 years.
Speaker 1:It's been a long time.
Speaker 2:Ookla got its start back in 2006, actually rolled out of an ISP that was trying to figure out how to best measure what they were actually delivering to clients, and Speedtest was an experiment that ended up becoming a business, rolled out of that, as I mentioned, in 2006. And initially was available as a Flash application in the early days, you know, in your browser. Flash application in the early days, you know in your browser. But not only can you still use browser take Speedtest in a browser by going to speedtestnet, but we have mobile applications that have become extraordinarily popular and just to give you an idea of the scale of that, we've seen in the neighborhood of about 650 million installations of our mobile application globally Wow yeah.
Speaker 2:And we see tens of millions of tests a day Consumers take consumer initiated tests account for in the neighborhood of about 11 million at last count, and those are taken on speed test servers that are run by our ISP partners all over the world. We've got, I think, between 15,000 and 16,000 server locations. So when you take a speed test you're always relatively close to the server, unless you manually choose otherwise. You are going to be very close to the server where your test is taken and it has really given the public a lot of insight free of charge, for them to understand what their connectivity is under given circumstances.
Speaker 1:Yeah, very powerful. And, as you say, most people know about speed test. But what else does Ookla do? That might surprise us, because there's a lot.
Speaker 2:There is quite a lot. There is quite a bit. I mentioned that my company, mosaic, had been purchased back in 2018. And our purpose was really tracking coverage all over the world spectrum holdings, and that's that's part of Ookla's portfolio now. But there's other names that would be even better known by the public.
Speaker 2:Down Detector is the one I'll mention first. It's gotten a lot of press this year as some major network outages have taken place. It has been well quoted in the press and more and more people use it. We actually have a way for people to go check if the service that they're having trouble with is down or other people having similar problems, and it was very complimentary to speed test, because a lot of times people take a speed test because they're having a bad experience. That doesn't necessarily mean that the ISP is underperforming. It can often be the site that they're trying to use, whether it's a gaming site, a banking site or something very critical like Power, or their ISP itself. So it's gotten very, very popular this past year.
Speaker 2:We also own RootMetrics, which is another name that a lot of people in the public are familiar with.
Speaker 2:Speedtest and DownDetector are both crowdsourced data collection. Rootmetrics is controlled data collection and we have a team of drivers and we service a number of different countries, but here in the United States we drive test every six months the top 125 metro areas and the major operators use this as a way to understand and benchmark themselves one to the other and how they're doing in this market or that market, and it's very detailed. It's not just speed testing, which is certainly part of it, but we collect RF information, rf quality, rf strength, signal strength for those who might not be familiar with the term RF and even voice quality. We do test calls where we can determine how the voice quality compares from one network to another. And then the last one that I would mention, that's part of our overall brand group, is called EchoHau, and EchoHau is very well known within the enterprise connectivity space because it's the world's leading design and testing platform for Wi-Fi connectivity platform for Wi-Fi connectivity so big commercial operations, big box stores, commercial buildings, arenas very typically use.
Speaker 2:Echo how to design and then ultimately measure the quality of the connectivity on Wi-Fi within those venues.
Speaker 1:Wow, I had no idea. That is absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 2:Wow, I had no idea. That is absolutely fascinating and you know the big picture is with so much federal funding going this particular subject matter for the last two and a half three years. You know BEAD is the name of the program that's gotten so well known which was rolled out as part of the infrastructure the bipartisan infrastructure bill back in 2021. It's come under a little bit of criticism of late in terms of how long it's taking to roll that out. There's $42.5 billion that was earmarked specifically for broadband expansion to areas where connectivity is inadequate or non-existent. So those B dollars. There's been a program that has been spun up. Ntia runs that program and Congress put a lot of requirements in there to make sure that the money was spent wisely, which I think as taxpayers we all certainly want to see happen, and we want those dollars to go as far as it possibly can. But it's taken a little while administratively to get that all up and running. But we are expecting early next year to see the first dollars actually go out to start connecting homes.
Speaker 2:That doesn't mean that there hasn't been expansion all along, as we have had other funds. Some of the COVID money, like ARPA, was used to roll out broadband connectivity. Money like ARPA was used to roll out broadband connectivity and there's a whole bunch. There's actually a couple of dozen different programs scattered across federal agencies to do that. So broadband is continually being altered across the country and our data has been used by not only NTIA the FCC has used our data for many things in the past but NTIA being specifically in charge of funding for this program, they have used our data over the past several years to determine indicators of need. Basically, where do we see? A lot of tests taking place and very few or no one is actually reaching the minimum requirements for the definition of broadband. And as the states have gotten more involved in that, then they've started using Oogla data to ultimately determine where they want to prioritize these funds.
Speaker 1:Well, good work there, more work to be done, so you're going to have a busy next few years, to say the least. So many of us have been watching enjoying the benefits of 5G. Personally, it's been fantastic to see I go up to Maine and amazing 5G coverage in places that I never thought would get it. It's been great. Thank you, t-mobile for that. But you know what are you seeing on the rollout of 5G? What insights are you getting from your data, not just in the US but beyond?
Speaker 2:Well, 5g is a really amazing technology, I think, and even though adoption of 5G equipment has really taken off with the public, I think there is yet to be truly a killer application for the public, other than what we have recently seen as a significant uptake in fixed wireless access, and so this has really allowed the now 4G introduced. You know all of these applications that depended upon navigation Uber and Lyft, doordash, right where the level of connectivity, the speed of the connectivity, the ability to view a map that's constantly changing second by second on your device Think of all of the different applications out there that use that and that, as well as the ability to watch fairly high resolution video on your devices. 4g brought us that. 5g has been a little bit of a mix in terms of what the public has really recognized out of it.
Speaker 2:You're not always on 5G. If you're within, many of the phones that are still out there really use 4G primarily and then jump up to 5G when it success is. With private rollout, private enterprise types of 5G deployments and they're already talking about 6G as well the engineers are working fast on bringing new technologies to market. Much of this will really improve efficiency of the network. In some instances it may not even really be something that the public will notice, but if it allows the operators to be more efficient with how they use Spectrum, then they can be much more consistent in the services that they offer to the public.
Speaker 1:Fantastic opportunity. I imagine the other area you're helping is identifying areas where there's underserved communities when it comes to internet access. How's your data being used there?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you can certainly have underserved both on fixed connectivity and on wireless connectivity. Now we have seen the popularity of Starlink come along and has been adopted well by people who really don't have any other choice, but also for backup service in the event that their primary connectivity goes down for whatever reason, but as we see 5G getting expanded you mentioned T-Mobile. I mean they rolled out 5G on lower band spectrum and really expanded their footprint dramatically over the last several years by doing so.
Speaker 2:Now the lower end spectrum doesn't provide super high speed connectivity like the millimeter wave does, but the millimeter wave that was rolled out. Millimeter wave does, but the millimeter wave that was rolled out Verizon rolled out a lot of it in many major cities was really focused on very dense urban areas, downtown locations where you had a very, very high demand for data, and millimeter wave has a very short effective distance associated with it but can also carry through some crazy speeds. So when you see these speed tests where people are experiencing you know 2G, 2g, 3g and higher throughputs, that's generally going to be those very high spectrum allocations and deployments.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. So, as you know, we live in an era of climate weather emergencies. It seems like every month there's a new one, whether it's a hurricane or a wildfire, on and on. I imagine your data can be used for these kind of events, to look at network performance after natural disasters or other kinds of outages and plan for you know what's next.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we have certainly seen. Our data provide a pretty significant indication of what's going on in places. If you remember, a few years ago there was a truly devastating hurricane that went through Puerto Rico. It knocked out I think it was about 97% of the power across the island. Yeah, terrible and it took a long time, a long long time to get that infrastructure back up and running. Now, people can't take a speed test if there's no internet connection, but what we started seeing was a drop-off as power started as generators started failing.
Speaker 2:Even if the internet was up and running, you still have to have power. The devices ultimately run out of juice themselves, their batteries run down and so over a period of a day, you know, to two days, we really saw, you know, a significant drop off in connectivity that was going on there in Puerto Rico and then over time we saw that build back up in new areas of the island, light back up as people were getting power back, restoring the internet and taking the speed test to then test it. We also collect not only do we see speed test information, but we also can collect in the background on Android devices anonymously. I do do want to point out RF information, such as signal strength, signal quality. I mentioned root metrics, which is a controlled collection of this information, but with our mobile applications we can see the network quality and even estimate where the cell site locations are. Wow, we can actually paint a picture globally of where these networks exist.
Speaker 2:You mentioned disasters, and I used Puerto Rico in this example, but let me use one a little more recently that made big headlines and truly a tragic situation in Lahaina, hawaii, last year, and when you had that wildfire that raced in and really burned down the whole town.
Speaker 2:You saw the number of speed tests that we were seeing from satellite from just the town itself was very small because they had decent connectivity there up to that point.
Speaker 2:And then we saw regular speed tests on both the mobile networks and the fixed networks. You know, every day there was a fairly steady number of them coming in. When that wildfire went in, for two days we saw nothing. There was no connectivity on mobile or on or on fixed. The cell sites were burned as well, right, the cell sites were burned as well, Right, so that. But two days after that we saw what ended up really being an explosion of tests, both on Starlink for satellite, as well as the first net network, as the first net responders came in to try and rescue anything that was left, any people that were in need of assistance, and we saw the first net network light up at an extraordinary rate. And it's pretty amazing to see that and as we have, as a society, made the decision to build out these first responder network capabilities, to build out these first responder network capabilities to be able to see that really come into play, starts to justify the investment that's been made.
Speaker 1:That's wonderful to see how resilient we are and these networks really helping us. So what's next for Uclo in terms of network testing? Any emerging technologies or innovations that you're working on that you might be able to share? Evan?
Speaker 2:we're always working on new things. I mentioned that over the last several years, we have been on a little bit of an acquisition spree and the four companies that, or the four brands that I named Speedtest, echo, how Down Detector and Root Metrics only represent a portion of these capabilities that we have have acquired here at Ookla. Well, there's challenges associated with that. Every one of these companies was was collecting its own data, had its own way of doing so, was collecting its own data, had its own way of doing so. Every one of them had its own portal so you could go view that data and understand the data that was being collected. Well, there's a lot of work associated with then bringing all of that together and allowing those to be force multipliers.
Speaker 2:We rolled out earlier this year Speed Test Insights, which is the new portal that is. Now all of our speed test data is in there. Our RF visualization of signal strength, signal quality, is in there. Our tower database is now in there, and so this is really the beginning in there, and so this is really the beginning. Over the next couple of years, we expect that everything in the portfolio at least everything that's appropriate to do so will be pulled into this portal so that you'll be able to see everything overlaid layer by layer, and it's got a very strong search engine that we just continue to improve to allow people to pull in and visualize this. And the other thing that I think is really important about it is that we've had capabilities in the past where you could pull up all of this RF information and visualize coverage strength, coverage quality.
Speaker 2:But it was really built originally for the operators themselves, the carriers, the mobile carriers, well, so it's sort of geared toward them and all of the terminology that's included in it it doesn't say signal strength, it says RSRP.
Speaker 2:It doesn't say signal quality, it says RSRQ. Well, the average person looking at that doesn't necessarily know what it is, but many people need to understand telecommunications that weren't brought up in this industry or degreed within this industry, and so a big part of what we did with this platform was actually provide multiple views into the data, where someone who's got that telecommunications expertise can go view it the way that they need to. But you can literally flip a switch on it and it says you know, great, good, fair, poor, you know, on your signal strength information, you don't actually have to know the decibel level associated with the signal strength, and so there's a number of things that we've done in here to really make it much more easy to use, to literally draw a polygon on a map and say which operator has got the highest signal strength and quality within this area that I've defined. It can really eliminate guesswork as to whether or not a network provides adequate service in an area, and so we're very excited about this new platform.
Speaker 2:Again, it's called SpeedTest Insights. This data, much of this data, has been available through other platforms, but now bringing it all in to where you can see speed test, throughputs, throughput measurements right there, along with signal strength measurements, can give you a really good indicator as to whether or not this is a capacity problem or whether this is a signal issue problem. Just as awesome, incredible.
Speaker 1:I can't wait to check it out firsthand. Last but not least, you're the creator of the Speed Test Awards, kind of like the Oscars, for our industry generates a lot of excitement and buzz. What are the?
Speaker 2:next awards and tell us about. You know how they drive change in the industry as well. Well, that information is released every six months, so that gets refreshed on a regular basis, and this is global. Now there are a few countries where we don't really offer that because there's not enough data coming back from them yet. Until you've got a very high penetration of smartphones, then it's really not capable to no one really can pull enough information to determine you know what the overall quality of the network is. But we've got that really good information in about 140 countries.
Speaker 2:So it's it's most of the world where we're able to really take the deep dive and do a direct comparison. You know one network to another and be able to provide consumers with an idea of you know which operator can really offer the best service, the best speeds, and this is on both fixed and mobile networks. So it's a very popular capability for our clients. And if they don't win the award if they won the award last year and they didn't win it this last six months you know they can sometimes be very unhappy about it. But we are very, very strict about how we approach our methodology, making sure that it's consistent. We've recently updated because there's new measurements and new capabilities, and so we continue to fine tune it as we move forward, because it's as important as speed is.
Speaker 2:It's not the only characteristic. You know, consistency of the network, latency is becoming more and more important, and our global index compares country to country. But then within those countries we've got the ability to say with authority which operator is providing the best service, the fastest service, and they license that brand from ours because it's so well known. I mentioned how many people have just downloaded our mobile application. You know well over, you know 10% of the world If you just look at it from the numbers standpoint. And then many, many people, of course, are taking a speed test on through browsers as well, not just the applications. You add all that up and it's an extraordinarily strong global brand, both Speedtest and Ookla, but Speedtest in particular, and it's you know people license that brand to include in their marketing, and that's part of the awards process is that gives them the ability to go out and make that claim.
Speaker 1:Everyone loves a good competition. Well done there. So we're headed into the uh end of year sprint. What, what's on your radar? We got nwc coming up in a couple weeks. What else, uh, you're looking forward to?
Speaker 2:well, yeah, that's certainly a big show. Um, you know that nwc in barcelona is is huge, but this north american show, uh, has has really tilted very much toward enterprise as there's been so much consolidation in the industry but now there is so much demand within, everybody has to have connectivity Everyone does. It's just a part of the business plan these days.
Speaker 2:Broadband Nation is coming up in Washington DC in October. The Wireless Hall of Fame dinner is going to be on the 15th of October in DC. I'm looking forward to attending that, and I'm also going to be attending a broadband summit in Charleston, West Virginia, later in that month. So just the next 30 days. I've got a fair amount of travel in front of me. Just the next 30 days. I've got a fair amount of travel in front of me.
Speaker 2:The 5G fund as far as on the horizon and regulatory items, as we've been talking about 5G, I don't think I've mentioned yet there is a rural 5G fund that's been sitting out there for a while. The FCC has been trying to get it kicked back off again. That's $9 billion that's been allotted to improve wireless connectivity in areas, particularly rural, where service is just inadequate at this point, and so the FCC is in its final stages right now of determining what the rules are going to be. But there's a lot of rural operators, in particular regional operators around the country, that are very, very interested in taking part in that and competing to build infrastructure for wireless networks within these areas. So that's a big part of my focus right now, over the next several months, is getting prepared for that as well?
Speaker 1:Well, well done. Well, it's exciting times. Great to see us heading in the right direction data-wise, and thanks so much, brian, for joining us. Really insightful chat.
Speaker 2:Evan, thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:Thanks for being here. Thanks everyone for watching. If you don't use Speedtest or all the various apps, you're missing a trick. Really amazing opportunity to check out your network performance. Thanks everyone, take care.