Even though the faq's say they are only good for residential usage, i have had no problems with it at school. My college has 2x 100 Mb circuits from TW. When i run speed tests (I use speedtest.net) with the campus empty, i can get around 95Mb up. The bottleneck is the school's 100Mb switches. When the campus is filled (during the week) i can normally get close to 40 Mb down on a test.
-Grant On Sun, Dec 25, 2011 at 8:10 PM, Scott Berkman <sc...@sberkman.net> wrote: > The MIT article is good read, thanks for sharing that. > > One thing to watch out for is if the last mile provider is the one hosting > the speedtest site, that's another variable removed from the equation. In > some cases that is a good thing, in others it's not, depending on what you > are trying to measure. It's also theoretically possible (and in my opinion > not only likely but probably fairly common) for some large residential > ISP's > to not rate-limit these on-net test sites (either by design or as a side > result of at what point in the network they apply the rate limiting), > thereby showing much higher results than the end user could ever possibly > see in a real world scenario. > > Also, when using some of the popular public Ookla/speedtest.net sites, > their > FAQ clearly states that the tests are not suitable for certain connection > types like high speed services and non-residential services in general. > One > good example is Speakeasy's site, which in my personal experience has been > the one most commonly used by end users (especially those contacting us > about "speed problems"): > > http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/issues.php > > "Our speed test is tuned to measure residential broadband services up to 20 > Mbps over HTTP. It takes a very customized installation to be able to > accurately measure up to 100 Mbps over HTTP." > > -Scott > > -----Original Message----- > From: Frank Bulk [mailto:frnk...@iname.com] > Sent: Sunday, December 25, 2011 8:28 PM > To: 'Michael Holstein'; jacob miller > Cc: nanog@nanog.org > Subject: RE: Speed Test Results > > We host an Ookla Speedtest server onsite and find it a very reliable means > to identify throughput issues. The source of any performance issues may or > may not be ours, but if a customer says things are slow we can usually > identify whether it's their PC or network (browsing is slow but speed test > runs fine) or a local or regional network issue (speed test runs slow). > > If a customer gets less than 90% of the advertised throughput, we follow up > on it. > > Frank > > -----Original Message----- > From: Michael Holstein [mailto:michael.holst...@csuohio.edu] > Sent: Friday, December 23, 2011 1:27 PM > To: jacob miller > Cc: nanog@nanog.org > Subject: Re: Speed Test Results > > > > Am having a debate on the results of speed tests sites. > > > > Am interested in knowing the thoughts of different individuals in regards > to this. > > > > > > They are excellent tools for generating user complaints. > > (just like the "do traceroute and count the hops" advice from gamer mags > of old). > > (my $0.02) > > Michael Holstein > Cleveland State University > > > > > > >