Proving Gig Speed

Tue Jul 17 07:49:58 UTC 2018

On 16 July 2018 at 18:58, Chris Gross <CGross at ninestarconnect.com> wrote:

Hi Chris,

> I'm curious what people here have found as a good standard for providing solid speedtest results to customers. All our techs have Dell laptops of various models, but we always hit 100% CPU when doing a Ookla speedtest for a server we have on site. So then if you have a customer paying for 600M or 1000M symmetric, they get mad and demand you prove it's full speed. At that point we have to roll out different people with JDSU's to test and prove it's functional where a Ookla result would substitute fine if we didn't have crummy laptops possibly. Even though from what I can see on some google results, we exceed the standards several providers call for.
>
> Most of these complaints come from the typical "power" internet user of course that never actually uses more than 50M sustained paying for a residential connection, so running a circuit test on each turn up is uncalled for.
>
> Anyone have any suggestions of the requirements (CPU/RAM/etc) for a laptop that can actually do symmetric gig, a rugged small inexpensive device we can roll with instead to prove, or any other weird solution involving ritual sacrifice that isn't too offensive to the eyes?

I would say, don't use a browser based speed test - how fast is your
browser? Answer: It can vary wildly!

Also there are SO many variables when testing TCP you MUST test using
UDP if you want to just test the network path. Every OS will behave
differently with TCP, also with UDP but the variance is a lot lower.

Also I recommend you test to a server on you network near to your
peering & transit edge. This way users can test up to the point where
you would have over the "The Internet" and have no further control.
Testing to a server off-net (like off-net Ookla tells me nothing in my
opinion).

Virtually any modern day laptop with a 1G NIC will saturate a 1G link
using UDP traffic in iPerf with ease. I crummy i3 netbook with 1G NIC
can do it on one core/thread.

We have several iPerf servers dotted around the network and our
engineers can test to those at any time and it works well for us.

Cheers,
James.