I'm on my office network, which is not heavily utilized and has a 75/75 fiber connection to the internet. On speedtest.net or dslreports.com speed test, I get results that are in the neighborhood of 70/65, which is what I'd expect when an office of 40ish people are using the internet.MLab's test consistently shows speeds in the 12/6 range. Why would its results be so much slower?
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Internet performance tests may provide different results for a lot of reasons. Three of the main reasons for different results among tests are listed below:
1. Differences in the location of testing servers
Every performance test has two parts:
A test generates data between the client and the server, and measures performance between these two points. The location of these two points is important in terms of understanding the results of a given test.
If the server is located within your Internet Service Provider’s (ISP’s) own network (also known as the “last mile”), this is referred to as an “on-net” measurement. This approach lets you know about how your Internet connection is performing intra-network within your ISP, but it does not necessarily reflect the full experience of using the Internet, which almost always involves using inter-network connections (connections between networks) to access content and services that are hosted somewhere outside of your ISP. Results from on-net testing are often higher than those achieved by using other methods, since the “distance” traveled is generally shorter, and the network is entirely controlled by one provider (your ISP).
“Off-net” measurements occur between your computer and a server located outside of your ISP’s network. This means that traffic crosses inter-network borders and often travels longer distances. Off-net testing frequently produces results that are lower than those produced from on-net testing.
M-Lab’s measurements are always conducted off-net. This way, M-Lab is able to measure performance from testers’ computers to locations where popular Internet content is often hosted. By having inter-network connections included in the test, test users get a real sense of the performance they could expect when using the Internet.
2. Differences in testing methods
Different Internet performance tests measure different things in different ways. M-Lab’s NDT test tries to transfer as much data as it can in ten seconds (both up and down), using a single connection to an M-Lab server. Other popular tests try to transfer as much data as possible at once across multiple connections to their server. Neither method is “right” or “wrong,” but using a single stream is more likely to help diagnose problems in the network than multiple streams would. Learn more about M-Lab’s NDT methodology.
On 1/18/18, 10:59 AM, "xgma...@gmail.com" <xgma...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Modern modems are run with multiple channels now. You're one internet connection can be a 2 or 3 separate connections or data channels tied together in a bundle to give you speeds faster than the technology alone. An example of this is WOW's Docsis modems. With a Docsis 2 modem you have 2 channels and speeds up to 60mbps. Docsis 3 modem 3 channels are now used and speeds can be upwards of 100mbps.
[JL] FWIW, according to a 2016 Arris report (https://www.arris.com/globalassets/resources/white-papers/scte-future-directions-for-fiber-deep-hfc-deployments.pdf) in the near future most DOCSIS 3.0 networks will move to 32 bonded 3.0 channels and 4 DOCSIS 3.1 OFDM channels. This enables 1 Gbps services, which Comcast and other ISP networks are providing over DOCSIS networks (obviously also over fiber, and there are many other fiber-based ISPs). I don’t think there are many measurement tools that can adequately measure those speeds at scale (such as the scale at which Ookla operates).
> Measurement Labs does not support this technology which I think is a crock because all the major ISPs have shifted to this methodology for high-speed connections. I have stopped using their testing platform because it only runs on one channel and only effectively tests 1 third of my connection capabilities. I believe that Measurement Labs is an obsolete service and no longer offers valuable real-time information. This information is available on their own website if you read through their FAQ. If you're still using a 2-20mbps connection it may still be a valid test but in this day in age, it's just obsolete.
[JL] Steve Bauer from MIT has done some thinking about this. See his section on the M-Labs test in
https://www.measurementlab.net/publications/understanding-broadband-speed-measurements.pdf (Section 4.2.5) and his presentation on testing in the gigabit era at
https://www.caida.org/workshops/aims/1602/slides/aims1602_sbauer.pdf.
On Thursday, January 26, 2017 at 11:17:17 AM UTC-5, David Radin wrote:
I'm on my office network, which is not heavily utilized and has a 75/75 fiber connection to the internet. On speedtest.net or dslreports.com speed test, I get results that are in the neighborhood of 70/65, which is what I'd expect when an office of 40ish people are using the internet.
MLab's test consistently shows speeds in the 12/6 range. Why would its results be so much slower?
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ML measures the "real world" throughput, where peering connections between ISPs can become a bottleneck.
> An example of this is WOW's Docsis modems. With a Docsis 2 modem you have 2 channels and speeds up to 60mbps. Docsis 3 modem 3 channels are now used and speeds can be upwards of 100mbps.
For this thread, are we talking about performance testing over DOCSIS 2, or over DOCSIS 3?
DOCSIS 2 uses load balancing to distribute traffic among multiple channels, whereas DOCSIS 3 uses channel bonding.
As I understand, ML’s NDT performance test uses a single TCP connection. (Also confirmed in section 4.2.5.1 of the MIT paper cited below.)
DOCSIS 2 uses load balancing, so the NDT TCP connection packets will be transmitted over only one of the DOCSIS channels (to keep packets in order), and that channel may be more or less congested than other channels.
DOCSIS 3 is more likely to use channel bonding than load balancing, so the NDT TCP connection packets would be striped (ie inverse-multiplexed) across all available channels for transmission.
This is less of an issue for Speedtest/Ookla because that performance test uses multiple HTTP threads (aka parallel TCP connections), and they can be load balanced across multiple channels. (see section 4.2.2.1 of the MIT paper).
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