On Wed, Jul 18, 2018 at 9:01 AM Mark Tinka <mark.tinka@seacom.mu> wrote:
Personally, I don't think the content networks and CDN's should focus on developing yet-another-speed-test-server, because then they are just pushing the problem back to the ISP. I believe they should better spend their time:
- Delivering as-near-to 100% of all of their services to all regions, cities, data centres as they possibly can.
- Providing tools for network operators as well as their consumers that are biased toward the expected quality of experience, rather than how fast their bandwidth is. A 5Gbps link full of packet loss does not a service make - but what does that translate into for the type of service the content network or CDN is delivering?
Mark.
That's why I vastly prefer stats from the actual CDNs and content providers that aren't generated by speed tests. They're generated by measuring the actual performance of the service they deliver. Now, that won't prevent burden shifting, but it does get rid of a lot of the problems you bring up. Youtube for example wouldn't rate a video stream as good if the packet loss were high because it's actually looking at the bit rate of successfully delivered encapsulated video frames I _think_ the same is true of Netflix though they also offer a real time test as well which frankly isn't as helpful for monitoring but getting a quick test to the Netflix node you'd normally use can be nice in some cases.