Nate, you should route his call into a special phone tree that he can not escape out of. lol
From: AF <af-boun...@af.afmug.com> On Behalf Of Nate Burke Sent: Tuesday, November 5, 2019 9:43 AM To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group <af@af.afmug.com> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Priority on Speedtest.net I think it would be a good tool to have in the toolbox, but maybe selectively applied. We have one business customer (Broadband), every morning the "IT guy" will run a speedtest, and call in if it's not the 40mb he expects. He don't bother to look at any of his other network traffic, any downloads that are going on, if there are actually any problems. He only cares what speedtest shows, and if his screen doesn't show 40mb, then he's calling. Every time, !EVERY TIME!, it's because his network traffic is using the rest of the connection, which we explain to him EVERY TIME, but this has been his operating procedure for the last 3 years. "Hey guys, speeds are slow this morning, you need to check it and fix it." On 11/5/2019 9:30 AM, Ken Hohhof wrote: If you sell by speed tiers, I think speedtest.net can actually be your friend, and you don't want to doctor the results. If the guy on a 10 Mbps plan is complaining his Internet is slow because he can't watch 5 HD streams simultaneously, it helps to show him "you're getting what you're paying for". Then you can maybe upsell him to a higher speed tier. If he's downloading a 150 GB Xbox game, your tech support is going to have to educate him about restricting the hours that game consoles can do downloads. Making speedtest.net results look better isn't going to avoid that, in fact it may make that more difficult. The effort might be better spent finding a way to deprioritize software downloads, so people can watch video or pay games while new games are downloading. If you sell best effort "up to" speeds, the answer may be different. From: AF <af-boun...@af.afmug.com><mailto:af-boun...@af.afmug.com> On Behalf Of Adam Moffett Sent: Tuesday, November 5, 2019 8:46 AM To: af@af.afmug.com<mailto:af@af.afmug.com> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Priority on Speedtest.net If I'm being honest, it's partly a failure on the sales end to manage expectations on wireless ("up to 50mbps" etc), and partly a failure of tech support to manage the conversation. IMO they need to not let the customer focus on a speed test result and instead prompt them to talk about what their actual problems are. Whether the speed test says 10 meg or 50 meg has no bearing on the fact that you suck of Call of Duty or that your VPN to the office doesn't want to connect this morning. I think the idea is just make the speed test show what they want to see and then we can move the conversation forward. It strikes me as a viable but lazy and dishonest solution. I'm trying hard to be open minded. I appreciate all the thoughts on this. Thanks everyone. On 11/5/2019 8:01 AM, Daniel White wrote: I've worked extensively with Sandvine and Saisei and this is a topic that always comes up since it is fairly easy to implement via those appliances (and easier to implement across multiple speed testing sites). I don't see it as evil on a best effort connection. Customers typically are not likely to understand what the results mean and the only congestion it masks is on your network (which you should be aware of anyways). You can chalk it up to reasonable network management practices, as the intent is to show what your connection is capable of vs. what is available to you at that moment. Furthermore, unless the speedtest server is on your network, sometimes the issue is on the net or with the server so further impacting the results by giving the testing a low availability on your network is further giving your customers the wrong impression of your actual delivery. By implementing something though - how many support tickets are you potentially reducing? How about customer churn? If these are issues for you is it because you have actual congestion on your network? Is hacking the response worthwhile from a technical effort - and if your customers found out about it is it worthwhile from a PR standpoint? I usually end up somewhere in the it's cool to tinker with but of limited value in the real world. The PR fallout if your competition finds out and uses it against you is probably more damaging. My 2 cents. [photograph] Daniel White Co-Founder & Managing Director of Operations phone: +1 (702) 470-2766 direct: +1 (702) 470-2770 Adam Moffett wrote on 11/4/19 12:32: I can set a higher priority DSCP value on speedtest.net traffic. I tested this on one SM and it works great. On a busy AP at 9:30pm I was getting speedtest results from 12-20mbps. I set the speedtest traffic to DSCP 26 and enable a "medium" priority channel and now it's 34mbps every single time without fail (and at my data rate, frame size, etc that's all I could ever hope for). The question is: Would this be evil? The feeling is that for some customers there's nothing actually wrong except they run speedtest.net simultaneously as their XBox downloads a game and then call to report "slow" speeds. The feeling is that it would be easier to just let them see a bigger speed test number than to educate them (and some will always refuse to be educated). The evil part is that it would mask an actual congestion problem. There's also a notion being tossed around the office that our competitors are already doing this. I have no idea if they actually are, and I'm also not sure if I care what they're doing. -Adam
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