On 12/03/10 11:26 -0500, Scott Berkman wrote:
So have other people noticed that the Ookla/Speedtest.net/Speakeasy Bandwidth test often comes up VERY short on upload bandwidth results for anything other than residential-grade asymmetrical services?
We often get complaints from customers saying "I'm not getting the upload bandwidth I'm paying for", and when we ask what they are using to determine this, the answer is almost always either Speakeasy or Speedtest.net.
We certainly don't depend on or recommend these sites to customers (we have our own internal tools and usually recommend FTP or iperf), but everyone who deems themselves semi-knowledgeable seems to find their way there anyway. Do these sites simply not have the downstream bandwidth to handle the upload tests? If thats the case I'd really like to see the admins add a disclaimer of some form directly to the site.
We decided to spend the money to install a local Ookla speed test site a couple of years ago and have been happy with the decision: 1) Local customers who run the speed test get much more accurate readings than with what we were previously using, which was either javascript based, or java based. The Ookla software we're running is flash based, which a very high number of our users already have installed. 2) It gets placed on the main speedtest.net map. When our customers go to speedtest.net to test their speeds, the default test location they get is our own site, and they get accurate results. 3) When customers from local competitors go to speedtest.net, they get defaulted to our test location, and get less than accurate readings (since they are not on our local network) and get artificially depressed results, which is a positive for us. On a side note, we've tried to sign up for Ookla's pingtest.net, but haven't gotten any responses from them about it. Has anyone else had any success signing up for it? -- Dan White