[on residential broadband connections] Mikael Abrahamsson writes:

Some things that comes to mind:

speed latency to some points geographically near the user MTU of the connection If PMTUD works or not queueing (FIFO or something "better") antispoofing (BCP38) compliance filtering (IPv6 transition protocols for instance, lots more possible) buffer depth ingress/egress ECN ISP provided DNS resolver properties (DNSSEC, EDNS etc)

That's an excellent start. I would add * availability of global IP addresses (0-n) * ability to connect to "unusual" ports (falls under "filtering") * ability to accept connections * interception of common TCP ports such as 80 and 25 * transparency for various header fields (addresses & ports¸ DSCP...) * rate-limits for specific protocols (ICMP, BitTorrent...) * latency and throughput for some popular sites/resources, including those using CDNs, at various times of day/week ...and of course... * availability of IPv6

I'm sure there are lots more, and this could probably not be done using a web browser driven application, but instead would have to be an application, thus harder to get people to use generally.

Any work being done in this area already that someone can point to?

Check out M-Lab - http://www.measurementlab.net/ -- Simon.

Hi, I'll toss in that I2 and GEANT have been developing the PerfSONAR toolset. http://www.perfsonar.net/ Regards, Chris On Sun, 28 Mar 2010, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:

I've been pondering what aspects of a residential broadband connection that would be worthwhile in testing, which would also be some kind of incentive for ISPs to start doing "better".

Some things that comes to mind:

speed latency to some points geographically near the user MTU of the connection If PMTUD works or not queueing (FIFO or something "better") antispoofing (BCP38) compliance filtering (IPv6 transition protocols for instance, lots more possible) buffer depth ingress/egress ECN ISP provided DNS resolver properties (DNSSEC, EDNS etc)

I'm sure there are lots more, and this could probably not be done using a web browser driven application, but instead would have to be an application, thus harder to get people to use generally.

Any work being done in this area already that someone can point to? I'd also like to use some of this tech to do "web server tests", especially when it comes to PMTUD working, especially when for a IPv6 world it would be nice to have an easily available testing suite for these basic mechanisms.

-- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se