  The Internet has become indispensable to daily activities, such as work,
education and health care. Many of these activities require Internet access
data rates that support real-time video conferencing. However, digital
inequality persists across the United States, not only in who has access but in
the quality of that access. Speedtest by Ookla allows users to run network
diagnostic tests to better understand the current performance of their network.
In this work, we leverage an Internet performance dataset from Ookla, together
with an ESRI demographic dataset, to conduct a comprehensive analysis that
characterizes performance differences between Speedtest users across the U.S.
Our analysis shows that median download speeds for Speedtest users can differ
by over 150Mbps between states. Further, there are important distinctions
between user categories. For instance, all but one state showed statistically
significant differences in performance between Speedtest users in urban and
rural areas. The difference also exists in urban areas between high and low
income users in 27 states. Our analysis reveals that states that demonstrate
this disparity in Speedtest results are geographically bigger, more populous
and have a wider dispersion of median household income. We conclude by
highlighting several challenges to the complex problem space of digital
inequality characterization and provide recommendations for furthering research
on this topic.
