Proving Gig Speed

Wed Jul 18 12:27:50 UTC 2018

On 18/Jul/18 14:00, K. Scott Helms wrote:

>
> That's absolutely a concern Mark, but most of the CPE vendors that
> support doing this are providing enough juice to keep up with their
> max forwarding/routing data rates.  I don't see 10 Gbps in residential
> Internet service being normal for quite a long time off even if the
> port itself is capable of 10Gbps.  We have this issue today with
> commercial customers, but it's generally not as a much of a problem
> because the commercial CPE get their usage graphed and the commercial
> CPE have more capabilities for testing.

I suppose the point I was trying to make is when does it stop being
feasible to test each and every piece of bandwidth you deliver to a
customer? It may very well not be 10Gbps... perhaps it's 2Gbps, or
3.2Gbps, or 5.1Gbps... basically, the rabbit hole.

Like Saku, I am more interested in other fundamental metrics that could
impact throughput such as latency, packet loss and jitter. Bandwidth,
itself, is easy to measure with your choice of SNMP poller + 5 minutes.
But when you're trying to explain to a simple customer buying 100Mbps
that a break in your Skype video cannot be diagnosed with a throughput
speed test, they don't/won't get it.

In Africa, for example, customers in only one of our markets are so
obsessed with speed tests. But not to speed test servers that are
in-country... they want to test servers that sit in Europe, North
America, South America and Asia-Pac. With the latency averaging between
140ms - 400ms across all of those regions from source, the amount of
energy spent explaining to customers that there is no way you can
saturate your delivered capacity beyond a couple of Mbps using Ookla and
friends is energy I could spend drinking wine and having a medium-rare
steak, instead.

For us, at least, aside from going on a mass education drive in this
particular market, the ultimate solution is just getting all that
content localized in-country or in-region. Once that latency comes down
and the resources are available locally, the whole speed test debacle
will easily fall away, because the source of these speed tests is simply
how physically far the content is. Is this an easy task - hell no; but
slamming your head against a wall over and over is no fun either.

Mark.