Proving Gig Speed

[nanog at ics-il.net (Mike Hammett)]

Fast.com will pull from multiple nodes at the same time. I think there were four streams on the one I looked at, two to the on-net OCA and two that went off-net elsewhere. One of those off-net was in the same country, but very not near. 




----- 
Mike Hammett 
Intelligent Computing Solutions 
http://www.ics-il.com 

Midwest-IX 
http://www.midwest-ix.com 

----- Original Message -----

From: "K. Scott Helms" <kscott.helms at gmail.com> 
To: "mark tinka" <mark.tinka at seacom.mu> 
Cc: "NANOG list" <nanog at nanog.org> 
Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2018 8:41:41 AM 
Subject: Re: Proving Gig Speed 

On Wed, Jul 18, 2018 at 9:01 AM Mark Tinka <mark.tinka at 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.