North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Speedtest site accuracy [was: Bandwidth issues in the Sprint network]

  • From: Jeff Shultz
  • Date: Tue Apr 08 16:39:45 2008

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