STATEMENT OF COMMISSIONER AJIT PAI
ON EXPANDING MEASURING BROADBAND AMERICA TO MOBILE PRESENTATION
November 14, 2013
Thank you to Walter Johnston and James Miller from the Office of Engineering and Technology, 
and Eric Spry from the Office of Strategic Planning and Policy Analysis for your presentation.  As we’ve
seen, the FCC Speed Test App is a promising tool.  And I hope that it will allow app users, the 
Commission, and the public at large to better understand wireless broadband network performance.
This app demonstrates what we can achieve when some of the best minds inside and outside the 
agency come together. I’m pleased that the Commission worked with a team of privacy experts to ensure 
the app does not collect personally identifiable information and to anonymize the identity of users before 
public disclosure.  It’s also important to note that the Commission is being transparent.  For people who 
are interested in how this app works, there is no wizard hidden behind the curtain; it’s all open source.  
You can get on Github, download the code, and suggest improvements or develop versions for your own 
needs.
1
  Indeed, I’m excited to see how innovators, academics, and others will use this app to answer 
questions we haven’t even thought to ask.
I also look forward to seeing the results from this next step in the Commission’s Measuring 
Broadband America program.  In particular, I believe that data generated by the app will confirm the 
success of our nation’s wireless policies.  Those policies, inspired by a longstanding, bipartisan 
deregulatory consensus, have led to more robust deployment and faster speeds.  According to Cisco, for 
example, American consumers currently enjoy the second fastest mobile broadband speeds in the world.
America’s carriers outpace those in Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France, 
among others.  To maintain this strong position, we must auction more spectrum for mobile broadband, 
enable broader unlicensed use of the 5 GHz band, and avoid intrusive regulation that will deter innovation 
and infrastructure investment.
On a self-interested note, I look forward to the release of the iOS version of the app so that I can 
see how my own experience compares to those of other consumers here in Washington, back in Kansas, 
and across the nation as a whole.  In the interim, I encourage everyone with an Android phone or tablet to 
download the app, test it out, and submit your data.
                                                     
1
See FCC, 2013 Measuring Broadband America Program Mobile Measurement Android Application, 
https://github.com/FCC/mobile-mba-androidapp/tree/RC4.