On Fri, 12 Mar 2010, Joe Greco wrote:
I've gotten strange stuff each time I've tried their tests. I particularly like the factor of 10 difference in upload speeds.
The FCC is probably doing this because US providers generally don't release actual bandwidth, speeds or latency numbers their consumer customers get.
I understand the point behind the test.
Advertised numbers often don't mean anything. If providers want to release better data, it might help the FCC understand the current environment.
Some US providers have published data for their business customer connections and backbones.
I realize that a high level of participation could result in the FCC gaining a more complete understanding of broadband penetration, and specific areas where there are problems. However, I have some reservations as to whether or not the FCC will be able to get enough people to participate in this to be able to generate a meaningful dataset. Further, major inconsistencies such as what I just pointed out brings into question the validity of the test, and therefore the value. I am not that concerned about the difference between 4Mbps and 5Mbps, but when there's an order of magnitude difference involved... on the same connection... I would guess, hopefully correctly, that Speedtest.net, Akamai, and others already have a good handle on broadband speeds, and it seems to me that the FCC could get a much more thorough picture of per-ISP performance (which of course isn't street-level) simply by getting these guys to summarize their results. As such, the only real value I see the FCC tool offering is the potential for visibility into things such as DSL speed/distance limitations, but in order for that to be meaningful, you'd have to get a lot of people to run the test. Which brings us back to ... I'm not entirely sure that this is a useful strategy. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.