On Sat, Jan 29, 2011 at 1:29 PM, Jeff Richmond <jeff.richmond@gmail.com> wrote:
Mike, nothing is perfect, so let's just start with that. What the FCC has done to measure this is to partner with Sam Knows and then have friendly DSL subs for the participating telcos to run modified CPE firmware to test against their servers. We have been collecting data for this for the past couple of months, actually. More can be found here:
note that samknows has some deficiencies in their platform, at least: o no ip v6 support o the home-routers/gateways/aps randomly reboot with completely non-functional setups their customer support ... isn't really available, ever.
While even that I have issues with, it certainly is better than hitting that speedtest site where anything at all problematic on the customer LAN side of the CPE can cause erroneous results.
the above aside, how about using the network test suite from Mlabs? <http://www.measurementlab.net/measurement-lab-tools> Or ask the swedish folk who've deployed 'speedtest' gear for the swedish isp/users to tst against? (common test infrastructure). -chris