[147897] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Speed Test Results
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Grant Ridder)
Sun Dec 25 21:44:43 2011
In-Reply-To: <06a601ccc373$83de2190$8b9a64b0$@sberkman.net>
Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2011 20:43:46 -0600
From: Grant Ridder <shortdudey123@gmail.com>
To: Scott Berkman <scott@sberkman.net>, nanog@nanog.org
Cc: jacob miller <mmzinyi@yahoo.com>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
Even though the faq's say they are only good for residential usage, i have
had no problems with it at school. My college has 2x 100 Mb circuits from
TW. When i run speed tests (I use speedtest.net) with the campus empty, i
can get around 95Mb up. The bottleneck is the school's 100Mb switches.
When the campus is filled (during the week) i can normally get close to 40
Mb down on a test.
-Grant
On Sun, Dec 25, 2011 at 8:10 PM, Scott Berkman <scott@sberkman.net> wrote:
> The MIT article is good read, thanks for sharing that.
>
> One thing to watch out for is if the last mile provider is the one hosting
> the speedtest site, that's another variable removed from the equation. In
> some cases that is a good thing, in others it's not, depending on what you
> are trying to measure. It's also theoretically possible (and in my opinion
> not only likely but probably fairly common) for some large residential
> ISP's
> to not rate-limit these on-net test sites (either by design or as a side
> result of at what point in the network they apply the rate limiting),
> thereby showing much higher results than the end user could ever possibly
> see in a real world scenario.
>
> Also, when using some of the popular public Ookla/speedtest.net sites,
> their
> FAQ clearly states that the tests are not suitable for certain connection
> types like high speed services and non-residential services in general.
> One
> good example is Speakeasy's site, which in my personal experience has been
> the one most commonly used by end users (especially those contacting us
> about "speed problems"):
>
> http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/issues.php
>
> "Our speed test is tuned to measure residential broadband services up to 20
> Mbps over HTTP. It takes a very customized installation to be able to
> accurately measure up to 100 Mbps over HTTP."
>
> -Scott
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Frank Bulk [mailto:frnkblk@iname.com]
> Sent: Sunday, December 25, 2011 8:28 PM
> To: 'Michael Holstein'; jacob miller
> Cc: nanog@nanog.org
> Subject: RE: Speed Test Results
>
> We host an Ookla Speedtest server onsite and find it a very reliable means
> to identify throughput issues. The source of any performance issues may or
> may not be ours, but if a customer says things are slow we can usually
> identify whether it's their PC or network (browsing is slow but speed test
> runs fine) or a local or regional network issue (speed test runs slow).
>
> If a customer gets less than 90% of the advertised throughput, we follow up
> on it.
>
> Frank
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael Holstein [mailto:michael.holstein@csuohio.edu]
> Sent: Friday, December 23, 2011 1:27 PM
> To: jacob miller
> Cc: nanog@nanog.org
> Subject: Re: Speed Test Results
>
>
> > Am having a debate on the results of speed tests sites.
> >
> > Am interested in knowing the thoughts of different individuals in regards
> to this.
> >
> >
>
> They are excellent tools for generating user complaints.
>
> (just like the "do traceroute and count the hops" advice from gamer mags
> of old).
>
> (my $0.02)
>
> Michael Holstein
> Cleveland State University
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
