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

Tue Apr 8 21:26:39 UTC 2008

At 04:20 PM 4/8/2008, you wrote:

>Doug Clements wrote:
>
>>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
>
>  Regarding speed test software, what are people running, and what 
> do you think of it?
>
>  It was surprisingly hard to find such stuff the last time I looked 
> - right now I've got the guy who decide$ looking at the same 
> software that http://speedtest.vonage.com appears to be running. 
> Downside is that it requires Java.
>
>  The stuff we've got (it was here before I was, 5 years ago) is 
> definitely showing it's age - it doesn't even have the capability 
> to do upload speed tests, and it's "quick test" while adequate for 
> 1.5mb DSL's gets really flaky when you toss a 6 or 8mb/sec DSL at it.

If you go to Speakeasy.net and run their test, the vendor of theirs 
has a logo showing (and clickable). This outfit produces nice-looking 
speed test software.

That said, it just reported my Comcast Business account as getting 
25Mbps down, and 1.4Mbps up, which is pretty unlikely. Clearing the 
browser cache alters the displayed speed considerably, so this is a 
good indication of the usefulness (or lack thereof) of some of this software. 