[103602] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Speedtest site accuracy [was: Bandwidth issues in the Sprint
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jeff Shultz)
Tue Apr 8 16:38:30 2008
Date: Tue, 08 Apr 2008 13:20:04 -0700
From: Jeff Shultz <jeffshultz@wvi.com>
To: NANOG list <nanog@nanog.org>
In-Reply-To: <54da514e0804081258q20993ffci44812259e84ab5f6@mail.gmail.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
Doug Clements wrote:
> We tell our customers to make sure to use the test site on our
> network, which will be quite a bit more accurate than some random
> location on the internet they might pick.
>
> There's no reason it can't be reasonably accurate, if you care to
> address it. We normally get within a few percent of a given line rate
> ranging over normal DSL speeds to T1s to DS3s to Fast Ethernet. It's a
> very easy and user-understandable way to say "Your T1 is installed,
> there's no errors that we see, you're getting about 1.4mbit on the
> speed test, have a nice day", or, alternately, "You're getting
> 95mbit/sec down and only 45mbit/sec up, you probably have a duplex
> mixmatch on your newly installed colo server".
>
> --Doug
>
Regarding speed test software, what are people running, and what do
you think of it?
It was surprisingly hard to find such stuff the last time I looked -
right now I've got the guy who decide$ looking at the same software that
http://speedtest.vonage.com appears to be running. Downside is that it
requires Java.
The stuff we've got (it was here before I was, 5 years ago) is
definitely showing it's age - it doesn't even have the capability to do
upload speed tests, and it's "quick test" while adequate for 1.5mb DSL's
gets really flaky when you toss a 6 or 8mb/sec DSL at it.
--
Jeff Shultz
