What Happened To My Internet?

If your mobile apps are slow or your videoconferencing is choppy and you don’t know why… if you manage a network and need better visibility into problems between Carriers, an entrepreneurial team at U of T is bridging the gap between fast, free, crowdsourced solutions and the more detailed, accurate apps requiring a subscription. If you support independent analytics in telecom, mobile, and the internet marketplace, then you are asked to consider participating in this work as features are developed.

When power systems go down, or other critical services fail, we’ll often use a web page to see whether the problem is identified, and when service might be restored. But the Internet itself is a highly interdependent community of Carriers and Service Providers often passing your own activity through several different networks. It’s helpful that when one network fails, your connection can be re-routed almost without disruption to your experience. This is convenient to Users, but extended performance issues can cause all kinds of problems for network providers and consumers – especially when clear answers aren’t forthcoming.

This team is following the same strategy that disrupted the 7-Billion dollar videoconferencing market with less-expensive, less-complicated solutions: Use the same technology as the bigger, more expensive solution providers but without the overhead, and with greater efficiency. They have a deep understanding of traditional and cloud networks and can reverse-engineer and statistically infer great amounts of insight into Internet activity. The challenge for them (and yourself) is to settle on the most effective reporting structure for daily use – while maintaining deeper reporting capabilities for long-term planners.

What advantages favor this team as we head into 2024? Margin and innovation to be sure. A certain, well-known app is tracking 12,000 Internet services worldwide. Meanwhile, this team already has a POC tracking over 2,000 services on a budget of $40/month! They haven’t yet incorporated other interesting databases (LERG, cell-tower networks etc..) but are aware of their potential applications in capacity, fraud-detection, and service verification (see issues related to FCC Broadband database).

If you have read this far, then please consider responding – either directly (LinkedIn messaging / [email protected] ) or through comments. The following questions form part of their initial survey (in their own words). Please indicate whether you would like to be more directly involved.

Professional users / Companies

• How long have you been in this industry?
• What difficulties or challenges do you encounter in network troubleshooting?
• Can you describe one experience where you were unable to resolve an issue?
• Could you share the preferred apps that you are using to troubleshoot network issues?
• What tools / software are you using regularly to monitor network performance??
• What improvements would you like to see in the apps that you use?
• How do you rate the cost, time and labor involved in the apps you are using??
• Given what you understand about this project, what advice or questions are top of mind?