Testing 1gbps bandwidth

Tue Aug 14 16:09:11 UTC 2012

Have you looked at M-lab? XO and Global Crossing(Lvl3) now use this a their primary.  XO still has some servers on various nodes, but they only get turned up for testing on a case by case basis. AboveNet has a larger presence in Europe, but no testing servers I've found yet.

J.J. Mc Kenna

On Tue, 14 Aug 2012, Eric Wieling wrote:

> Is there a speedtest.net-like site you like?

The problems can be:
1. Finding one that gives consistent results, as others have already noted.
2. Finding one that is topologically close to you.  Me testing from my office in Pittsburgh, PA to a server in Washington, DC isn't necessarily an accurate test if I have to jump through 4-5 different ASs to reach it.
3. Path asymmetry can skew your test results.  The path between you and the test server is not necessarily (often isn't) the same as the path from the test server back to you, and problems on the return path might not be as readily visible to you, when you only have access to a full suite of diagnostic tools at only one end.

Sometimes speed-test sites are fine for basic benchmarking, but I wouldn't treat the results as gospel of rely on them alone to prove/disprove whether a provider is delivering the bandwidth I contracted for.

jms

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nick Hilliard [mailto:nick at foobar.org]
> Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2012 11:09 AM
> To: nanog at nanog.org
> Subject: Re: Testing 1gbps bandwidth
>
> On 14/08/2012 15:43, valdis.kletnieks at vt.edu wrote:
>> case trying to use one of the speedtest.net servers - we had a clear 
>> 10G path out through like 3 AS's in a row, the bottleneck was 
>> speedtest.net's server. :)
>
> you'll have to forgive me for being the cynical type, but I gave up on Speedtest the day they reported 146Mbit/sec download over a link which was hard-wired to 100Mbit/sec full duplex, and later that day they reported 2Mbit from another nearby server to the same box.  I figured a stddev of 2 orders of magnitude wasn't going to give me figures accurate enough for my requirements.
>
> But hey, this is the Internet: ymmv, ianal, lolwut, bbq.
>
> Nick
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