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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Speedtest site accuracy [was: Bandwidth issues in the Sprint network]
On Tue, 8 Apr 2008, Scott Weeks wrote: To other medium-sized eyeball network providers (I'm defining medium size as 50-150K DSL/Cable connections and 50-1500 leased line customers): are you seeing this and what do you tell your customers? We're having this big push here in Sweden with something that basically translates into "broadband checkup". It's also web based, and it ended up in the national papers last week, where the newspapers misinterpreted 9.53 megabit/s of TCP thruput on a 10 meg ethernet connection as "barely acceptable" or something of that nature. We're seeing difference in results on the same computer depending on what browser is being used, and other strange results. Yes, it's a basic test and it should be treated that way, unfortunately quite a lot of users expect to get the same number they have purchased, so when they have purchased 8 megabit ADSL, they expect this test to say 8 megabit/s. Industry standard here is that 8/1 is ATM speed, so best results one can expect is approx 6.7 megabit/s of TCP thruput. So yes, this is seen and it's a problem I guess we as an industry have to learn how to handle. Swedish ISPs are adopting fineprint in their ads on expected speed to be seen in this tool, as it seems the users are very keen on using it. What worries me is that people will get dissatisfied with their connection even though there is nothing wrong with it and that they won't get better service elsewhere if they switch ISPs. It's good that there is a test, but since we're a market where 100/100 ethernet connections are fairly prevalent, this test doesn't work properly (75 megabit/s result on a 100/100 was listed in the paper as "not acceptable" which we all understand is unfair). -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: [email protected]
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