On 12/03/10 11:26 -0500, Scott Berkman wrote:
So have other people noticed that the Ookla/Speedtest.net/Speakeasy
Bandwidth test often comes up VERY short on upload bandwidth results for
anything other than residential-grade asymmetrical services?
We often get complaints from customers saying "I'm not getting the upload
bandwidth I'm paying for", and when we ask what they are using to determine
this, the answer is almost always either Speakeasy or Speedtest.net.
We certainly don't depend on or recommend these sites to customers (we have
our own internal tools and usually recommend FTP or iperf), but everyone who
deems themselves semi-knowledgeable seems to find their way there anyway.
Do these sites simply not have the downstream bandwidth to handle the upload
tests? If thats the case I'd really like to see the admins add a
disclaimer of some form directly to the site.
We decided to spend the money to install a local Ookla speed test
site a couple of years ago and have been happy with the decision:
1) Local customers who run the speed test get much more accurate readings
than with what we were previously using, which was either javascript based,
or java based. The Ookla software we're running is flash based, which a
very high number of our users already have installed.
2) It gets placed on the main speedtest.net map. When our customers go to
speedtest.net to test their speeds, the default test location they get is
our own site, and they get accurate results.
3) When customers from local competitors go to speedtest.net, they get
defaulted to our test location, and get less than accurate readings (since
they are not on our local network) and get artificially depressed results,
which is a positive for us.
On a side note, we've tried to sign up for Ookla's pingtest.net, but
haven't gotten any responses from them about it. Has anyone else had any
success signing up for it?
--
Dan White
