About
Access to reliable high-speed internet has quickly become a requirement for modern life. Yet numerous communities, particularly those in more remote areas, still lack access and any reasonable recourse to improve their situation. This is because large internet-server-providers (ISPs) typically advertise average or best-case speeds in an area that are not representative of real-world accessibility by consumers. As a result, gaining traction on legislative efforts to improve internet infrastructure becomes difficult, as frustrated individuals have no reliable data that reflects this discrepancy. This leaves legislators with no choice but to rely on the misrepresentative figures provided by ISPs.
The purpose of Rural Net is to provide a lightweight web application useable by anyone that can provide and store reliable repeated measurements of internet speed over multiple hours and days. Rural Net aims to make it easy to integrate this information with geolocation data, thereby providing a more accurate picture of real-world internet availability. At the same time, our hope is to share Rural Net and the collected internet speed data with any existing state or county level public service projects in this space, to facilitate future legislative efforts.
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