The MIT article is good read, thanks for sharing that. One thing to watch out for is if the last mile provider is the one hosting the speedtest site, that's another variable removed from the equation. In some cases that is a good thing, in others it's not, depending on what you are trying to measure. It's also theoretically possible (and in my opinion not only likely but probably fairly common) for some large residential ISP's to not rate-limit these on-net test sites (either by design or as a side result of at what point in the network they apply the rate limiting), thereby showing much higher results than the end user could ever possibly see in a real world scenario. Also, when using some of the popular public Ookla/speedtest.net sites, their FAQ clearly states that the tests are not suitable for certain connection types like high speed services and non-residential services in general. One good example is Speakeasy's site, which in my personal experience has been the one most commonly used by end users (especially those contacting us about "speed problems"): http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/issues.php "Our speed test is tuned to measure residential broadband services up to 20 Mbps over HTTP. It takes a very customized installation to be able to accurately measure up to 100 Mbps over HTTP." -Scott -----Original Message----- From: Frank Bulk [mailto:frnkblk@iname.com] Sent: Sunday, December 25, 2011 8:28 PM To: 'Michael Holstein'; jacob miller Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: RE: Speed Test Results We host an Ookla Speedtest server onsite and find it a very reliable means to identify throughput issues. The source of any performance issues may or may not be ours, but if a customer says things are slow we can usually identify whether it's their PC or network (browsing is slow but speed test runs fine) or a local or regional network issue (speed test runs slow). If a customer gets less than 90% of the advertised throughput, we follow up on it. Frank -----Original Message----- From: Michael Holstein [mailto:michael.holstein@csuohio.edu] Sent: Friday, December 23, 2011 1:27 PM To: jacob miller Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Speed Test Results
Am having a debate on the results of speed tests sites.
Am interested in knowing the thoughts of different individuals in regards to this.
They are excellent tools for generating user complaints. (just like the "do traceroute and count the hops" advice from gamer mags of old). (my $0.02) Michael Holstein Cleveland State University