Carrier Throttling Analysis
Mobile Broadband Performance and Data Cap Behavior in the US
About This Book
This book investigates mobile carrier throttling behavior in the United States using publicly available broadband performance data. The central questions:
- Do carriers deliver the throughput they advertise on “unlimited” plans?
- Is there evidence of throughput degradation after a usage threshold?
- Do carriers treat tethered data differently from on-device data?
Data Sources
| Source | What it provides |
|---|---|
| Ookla Open Data | Quarterly tile-aggregated speed test results by operator, 2022–2024 |
| FCC Measuring Broadband America | Panel mobile performance data with ISP metadata |
Tools
| Tool | Purpose |
|---|---|
| R 4.5.3 + tidyverse | Data wrangling and visualization |
arrow |
Reading Parquet files from S3 |
duckdb |
In-process SQL on large datasets |
sf |
Spatial operations on tile geometries |
changepoint |
Statistical detection of throughput breakpoints |
| AWS CLI | Fetching raw data from public S3 buckets |
Setup
Restore the exact package environment:
renv::restore()Then fetch raw data (run once):
Rscript data-raw/fetch_ookla.sh
Rscript data-raw/fetch_fcc.R