Over the past decade, Internet usage has grown by more than 3.5 times, to about 1.6 billion users; about 300 million of these are broadband subscribers. Unfortunately, despite this growing penetration and users' increasing reliance on broadband networks for critical or performance-sensitive applications, neither the research community nor industry knows much about the performance of access links, or how users configure and use networks inside the home. The lack of visibility into today's home networks makes it nearly impossible to understand the problems that users experience in these networks, let alone how to fix them. A critical first step towards improving our understanding of home networks is gathering data from homes. Towards this end, we are developing a home network measurement infrastructure consisting of (1) customized routers deployed in homes and (2) a central data collection server. We are deploying both the measurement infrastructure across hundreds of homes and collecting a corpus of active and passive measurements that will shed more light into home network performance and use. Given the proliferation of network devices in the home and the general public's growing attention to the performance of access networks, we expect that the infrastructure that we deploy and the data that we gather from this infrastructure will play in important role in improving our collective understanding of how home networks are used and how well they perform. We will disseminate our results through conference and journal publications, as well as talks with and presentations to researchers, policymakers, and practitioners.
