Speedtest site accuracy [was: Bandwidth issues in the Sprint network]

Tue Apr 8 19:58:33 UTC 2008

On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 11:15 AM, Scott Weeks <surfer at mauigateway.com> wrote:
>  This brings up a PITA point for me.  Recently, I have seen a rash of "Speedsite test server at <location> says blah, blah, blah" tickets finally reach me and I am telling everyone they're not an accurate way to measure network performance.  I notice that at least some are just sending text in Latin.
>
>  To other medium-sized eyeball network providers (I'm defining medium size as 50-150K DSL/Cable connections and 50-1500 leased line customers): are you seeing this and what do you tell your customers?

We tell our customers to make sure to use the test site on our
network, which will be quite a bit more accurate than some random
location on the internet they might pick.

There's no reason it can't be reasonably accurate, if you care to
address it. We normally get within a few percent of a given line rate
ranging over normal DSL speeds to T1s to DS3s to Fast Ethernet. It's a
very easy and user-understandable way to say "Your T1 is installed,
there's no errors that we see, you're getting about 1.4mbit on the
speed test, have a nice day", or, alternately, "You're getting
95mbit/sec down and only 45mbit/sec up, you probably have a duplex
mixmatch on your newly installed colo server".

--Doug