Hi Jeremy,

> On Mar 13, 2023, at 18:37, Jeremy Austin <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Mon, Mar 13, 2023 at 10:26 AM dan <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> 
> If you troubleshoot your ISP based on speed tests you will be chasing
> your tail.  Meanwhile, that internet facing interface can see the true
> numbers the entire time.  The consumer is pulling their full capacity
> on almost all links routinely even if briefly and can be nudged into
> pushing more a dozen ways (including a speed test).  The only thing
> lacking is a latency measurement of some sort.  Preseem and Libreqos's
> TCP measurements on the head end are awesome, but that's not available
> on the subscriber's side but if it were, there's the full testing
> suite.  how much peak data, what happened to latency.  If you could
> get data from the ISP's head end to diff you'd have internet vs isp
> latencies.    'speed test' is a stress test or a burn in test in
> effect.
> 
> I cannot upvote this enough. I call speed tests — and in fact any packet 
> injection doing more than a bare minimum probe — destructive testing, and 
> said as much to NTIA recently.

        [SM] Why? With competent traffic shaping, scheduling and AQM even a 
capacity test running at full throttle (like e.g a three minute bidirectional 
flent RRUL test) is not destructive to network responsiveness. I am not saying 
that the network behaves as if there was no load, but the old, "stop your 
downloads I have a VoIP call/vide conference coming scenario" really only need 
to happen at networks with way too little capacity assigned. 


> The *big problem* (emphasis mine) is that the recent BEAD NOFO, pumping tens 
> of billions of dollars into broadband, has *speedtests* as the "proof" that 
> an ISP is delivering.

        [SM] I respectfully disagree, as long as ISP market and price on 
capacity it is not unreasonable to actually have end-users actually measure 
capacity. I do agree the way we d this currently is sub-optimal though. And it 
is a but unfair to ISPs as other business fields are not held to such 
standards. However, my solution would be to hold other businesses equally to 
account for their promises, not letting ISPs off the hook ;) (but easy for me 
to say, I do not operate/work for an ISP and likely misunderstand all the 
subtleties involved).


> It's one thing to solve this problem at the ISP and consumer level. It's 
> another to solve it at the political level. In this case, I think it's 
> incumbent on ISPs to atone for former sins — now that we know that speed 
> tests are not just bad but actively misleading, we need to provide real tools 
> and education.

        [SM] +1; however as long as ISP essentially sell  capacity, capacity 
tests will stay relevant. 

> 
> Going back to my previous comment, and no disrespect meant to the CAKE 
> autorate detection: "How do we distinguish between constrained supply and 
> reduced demand *without injecting packets or layer violations*?"

        [SM] Oh, I share this question especially with my cake-autprate junior 
partner hat on... in theory one could not only use the organic load, but also 
the organic TCP timestamp increases as shown by pping to estimate times when 
the load exceeds/meets capacity (I think preseem have an iron in the fire there 
as well), but that is also not without its challenged. E.g. my router sits 
behind a bridged modem, but accesses the modem over the same link as the 
internet and routinely collects data from the modem, will pping now give the 
delay to the modem as its minimal estimate? If it does it is pretty much 
useless as that RTT is going to essentially stay flat as it is not affected by 
the bottleneck queue to/from the internet... (that is why the autorates opted 
for active probes as that allows to select spatially separate reflectors).

Regards
        Sebastian


> 
> -- 
> --
> Jeremy Austin
> Sr. Product Manager
> Preseem | Aterlo Networks
> preseem.com
> 
> Book a Call: https://app.hubspot.com/meetings/jeremy548
> Phone: 1-833-733-7336 x718
> Email: [email protected]
> 
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