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Robust and Extensible Measurement of Broadband Plans with BQT+

Laasya Koduru, Sylee Beltiukov, Alexander Nguyen, Eugene Vuong, Jaber Daneshamooz, Tejas Narechania, Elizabeth Belding, Arpit Gupta

TL;DR

BQT+, a broadband plan measurement framework that replaces monolithic workflows with declarative state/action specifications, is presented and it is shown that BQT+ sustains longitudinal monitoring of 64 ISPs, supporting querying for over 100 ISPs.

Abstract

Independent, street address-level broadband data is essential for evaluating Internet infrastructure investments, such as the $42B Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program. Evaluating these investments requires longitudinal visibility into broadband availability, quality, and affordability, including data on pre-disbursement baselines and changes in providers' advertised plans. While such data can be obtained through Internet Service Provider (ISP) web interfaces, these workloads impose three fundamental system requirements: robustness to frequent interface evolution, extensibility across hundreds of providers, and low technical overhead for non-expert users. Existing systems fail to meet these three essential requirements. We present BQT+, a broadband plan measurement framework that replaces monolithic workflows with declarative state/action specifications. BQT+ models querying intent as an interaction state space, formalized as an abstract nondeterministic finite automaton (NFA), and selects execution paths at runtime to accommodate alternative interaction flows and localized interface changes. We show that BQT+ sustains longitudinal monitoring of 64 ISPs, supporting querying for over 100 ISPs. We apply it to two policy studies: constructing a BEAD pre-disbursement baseline and benchmarking broadband affordability across over 124,000 addresses in four states.

Robust and Extensible Measurement of Broadband Plans with BQT+

TL;DR

BQT+, a broadband plan measurement framework that replaces monolithic workflows with declarative state/action specifications, is presented and it is shown that BQT+ sustains longitudinal monitoring of 64 ISPs, supporting querying for over 100 ISPs.

Abstract

Independent, street address-level broadband data is essential for evaluating Internet infrastructure investments, such as the $42B Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program. Evaluating these investments requires longitudinal visibility into broadband availability, quality, and affordability, including data on pre-disbursement baselines and changes in providers' advertised plans. While such data can be obtained through Internet Service Provider (ISP) web interfaces, these workloads impose three fundamental system requirements: robustness to frequent interface evolution, extensibility across hundreds of providers, and low technical overhead for non-expert users. Existing systems fail to meet these three essential requirements. We present BQT+, a broadband plan measurement framework that replaces monolithic workflows with declarative state/action specifications. BQT+ models querying intent as an interaction state space, formalized as an abstract nondeterministic finite automaton (NFA), and selects execution paths at runtime to accommodate alternative interaction flows and localized interface changes. We show that BQT+ sustains longitudinal monitoring of 64 ISPs, supporting querying for over 100 ISPs. We apply it to two policy studies: constructing a BEAD pre-disbursement baseline and benchmarking broadband affordability across over 124,000 addresses in four states.
Paper Structure (26 sections, 8 figures, 4 tables)

This paper contains 26 sections, 8 figures, 4 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background and Motivation
  3. Data Requirements
  4. System Requirements
  5. Why BQT Falls Short
  6. Abstraction and System Design
  7. Proposed Abstraction
  8. Abstraction-Enabled Disaggregation
  9. Implementation
  10. Intent Specification Interfaces
  11. Abstract-to-Concrete NFA Instantiation
  12. Observe--Match--Act Execution
  13. BQT+ Evaluation
  14. Experimental Setup
  15. System Properties in Practice
  16. ...and 11 more sections

Figures (8)

  • Figure 1: BQT vs. BQT+ . BQT encodes each ISP BAT as a single deterministic workflow in monolithic code; BQT+ encodes intent as an interaction state space (abstract NFA) traversed at runtime. Dotted/blue markings show where interface evolution forces changes: BQT edits/adds workflow code, while BQT+ adds/updates individual state specifications, and traverses from the currently observed state.
  • Figure 2: Empirical pressures imposed by policy-grade broadband measurement. (a) Heavy-tailed provider landscape: cumulative fraction of broadband serviceable locations (BSLs) covered as the system supports more ISPs (log-scaled x-axis). (b) BAT churn: breakdown of observed interface updates by whether they require adding new interaction states, editing existing ones, or both (56 updates over eight months across 64 longitudinally monitored ISPs).
  • Figure 3: BQT+ executes queries by compiling manual/agentic-authored abstract NFA intent into a concrete NFA and traversing it with an observe--match--act loop until a terminal state triggers extraction.
  • Figure 4: Technical-debt indicators: (a) per-state compression; (b) action API usage.
  • Figure 5: Detector reuse: (a) token growth with ISP coverage; (b) pairwise Jaccard similarity between detectors.
  • ...and 3 more figures