debates, for countries such as Iran, government opacity on broadband deployment means that domestic civil society and private parties have had few opportunities to embrace quantitative data to push for policy changes. Our research interest biases observations that are ubiquitous, recurrent and not necessitating the intervention of users, in order to plot historical trends and account for localized aberrations, even if at the cost of precision or confidence. As a result, to meet our operational needs, we resort to the use of measurements that, while not specifically designed to detect throttling, broadly assess relevant characteristics of the network in a manner that may indicate changes in the performance and nature of the host’s connectivity.

In order to collect a statistically significant set of network performance datapoints, we utilize the data collected by client-initiated measurements of the Network Diagnostic Tool (NDT) hosted by Measurement Lab (M-Lab) [@dovrolis2010measurement], which contains both a client-to-server (C2S) and server-to-client (S2C) component. The throughput test consists of a simple ten second transfer of data sent as fast as possible through a newly opened connection from a M-Lab server to a NDT client. In addition to measuring the throughput rate, the NDT test also enables the collection 