[c-nsp] Internet speed

[Mark Tinka]

On 14/Aug/18 20:29, Charles Sprickman wrote:

>
> The number of hours we spend chasing bad speedtest results is just 
> infuriating.  For some issues, it’s great (like customer should have
> multi-
> megabit service and multiple speedtest.net
> <http://speedtest.net> servers report sub-1Mb/s).

You need to start asking yourself whether all the costs you incur to
troubleshoot a customer that does not fully understand how TCP works,
LFN's, the limitations of speedtest.net and friends, e.t.c., is worth
the revenue you are making from them, if all that cost eats up the
revenue for that user 10 times over?


>
> But with 100Mb/s and 1Gb/s connections becoming the norm in the more
> densely populated suburbs, just how meaningful are these tests?

It's the same question Mac asks Gin, "What can you do with 7 billion
that you can't do with 4?"

When you have a customer complaining that he won't sign-off the service
because he is achieving 920Mbps on his speed test instead of of 1Gbps,
you can see how dark and deep that rabbit hole goes. Okay, on the
off-chance that my network was badly built, what's happening to the
920Mbps while you're asleep, having dinner, on the throne, out with the
family, entertaining guests...


>  I am
> lucky enough to have 1Gb/s FTTH at home.  It’s wonderful.  I have one
> desktop where the link between this switch (consumer $30 switches)
> will sometimes drop to 100Mb/s.  I can go a week or more without even
> noticing that.  Home or business - do people really feel the difference 
> between 400Mb/s and 900Mb/s on a 1Gb/s metro-e circuit?  How many
> endpoints they’re talking to can support that consistently?

Exactly.

I have a 100Mbps at my house. I know that I can't expect to push files
to Brazil from South Africa at 100Mbps, mostly because I know nothing
about the state of the network in Brazil (or anything else in between
beyond my ISP). Am I going to bang my head against the wall trying to
figure out why? Probably not.

If I can download my 2GB file in 2 minutes, do I really care whether I
hit 100Mbps or 50Mbps, or 30Mbps, or that that 2GB file didn't come down
in 30 seconds?

The Internet is such a complex web (no pun intended), and with
everything becoming part of the cloud more and more, this issue is going
to get worse.


>
> At least in the NYC area speedtest.net <http://speedtest.net> is
> getting really negligent in verifying
> that their partners that host the test servers actually have the
> capacity to act
> as test servers.  It’a a complete mess and it’s as if the folks at
> speedtest.net <http://speedtest.net>
> don’t grasp that the northeast is chock-full of FiOS and other
> high-bandwidth
> home and SoHo connections…  It’s a real PITA for anyone supporting
> customers of said connections, either as an ISP or an MSP.

You and I get that. The frustration is that customers think
speedtest.net is infallible... that they've built this very robust
global network that can test anything from 64Kbps to 1Tbps, and if that
falls short, it is the ISP's fault, and not speedtest.net. And customers
are unwilling to understand the mechanics that go into what
speedtest.net do.

It is such a rife problem, and I think it's time the folk at Ookla did
something about it.

We have stopped supporting Ookla's on our network, simply because we
don't believe they are part of the solution. We shut those boxes down
months ago, and down, they will remain.

Mark.