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Global "Last Mile" Performance Stats Going Public
Ookla, the company behind Speedtest.net, Pingtest.net, and the bandwidth testing apps deployed at many ISPs, has gone public with Net performance stats from 1.5 billion users (and counting). Their Net Index page displays download speed, upload speed, and connection "quality" from the EU and the G8, to countries, worldwide cities, and US states. Beginning today, the company is also making detailed (anonymized) data available to academics. "Ookla will also start surveying users about how much they pay for broadband and how much bandwidth they were promised by their ISPs. The results of those questions will go into building a Value Index, which will show how much people around the world pay per megabit-per-second for Internet access. In addition, by collecting postal codes from Speedtest users, Ookla hopes to map broadband service to local economic conditions, Apgar said. The Speedtest data could give the US government far more information to work with in setting priorities for its National Broadband Plan..."
The Speedtest data could give the US government far more information to work with in setting priorities for its National Broadband Plan..."
I wonder if we'll give away billions to ISPs without getting anything in return again.
'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.' - Mao Tse-tung
What's the story there?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
US is not in the top 10, couple of cities in the top 50 of those for download, none in upload? Is the USA really that far behind the curve, or is there another explanation?
("USian" if you're one of those "which country in America?" types)
I am... discomfited.. at the fact that several cities in former Warsaw Pact nations have nearly DOUBLE the residential downlink bandwidth that the heart of Silicon Valley has. WTF?
Oh, yeah, we definitely won that Cold War.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Interesting, seems my iPhone gets better throughput that some of the states in the US. Go figure. I just wish they'd work on the download/upload ratio on broadband. I agree it should be different, but 10/1 or 20/1 or worse is NOT good. It should be closer to 2/1 or at worst 3/1. Heck, even old analog modems had 2/1 ratios. It just seems worthless to have 20 Mb/s download when I can only get stuff up at less than 1 Mb/s (my current broadband ability). Not to mention if I telecommute, the upload speed kills my productivity!
While it's great to have last mile numbers, instead of useless metrics of advertised performance, there still needs to be a control for other factors, such as cost. For example, if you looked at my speedtest results you would see that I'm getting roughly 10/1 mbps, but what you would not see is that I pay $100/month and use a not-widely-available mlppp offering and multiple connections to get this. It's silly, because each of my modems is individually capable of this speed, but the ISP (the incumbent, not my wholesaler), in its monopoly has chosen to impose artificial barriers thereby enforcing unreasonable fees.
So yeah, I have reasonably fast internet for a Canadian, but at what price?
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
I'm pretty sure this study wildly and unpredictably overestimates the average available broandband speed. Not too many people know how to test their download bandwidth, and only people with specific need to check their bandwidth will do so. It also doesn't differentiate between mobile and fixed broadband speeds, which should affect the numbers significantly.
All in all, I really don't think this means anything. It could be possible to use it as a comparative tool by assuming that the proportion of internet savvy geeks is the same across the world, but I have no idea if that assumption is correct.
I just hope that no politician is going to use this data for anything serious.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
In response to my previous comment I ask the question: If the state of things in the US broadband wise is so bad, how do we fix it?
If we have a nation of geeks who were supposed to be getting "up to 1/3/6 Mbps down" who are all going to this site and are never seeing those max speeds in testing, what will it say about the need for truth in advertising? For that matter, connections are neutral - it doesn't matter if I'm a nerd or a jock or whatever, I have a Comcast connection like everyone else.
Instead of griping over it, this might be the time for a small campaign. My own personal plan is to put posts on my blog/whatever telling friends to run the test and answer the survey to see if they're getting what they're supposed to be.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
"City ranking requires at least 1,000 unique IP addresses for a given city." Sadly I live in a village with less than 1,000 houses so it won't show up on the results page.
Does this report on broadband offer any broader insights on Net Neutrality? Would instituting such a regime increase the gap between the US and other countries, or would it widen it and why?
The addresses are Speedtest.net and Pingtest.net. And yeah, I checked to make sure I got the capitalization correct.
speedtest.com is a squatter, and pingtest.com redirects to bandwidthplace.com, which looks awfully shady. Whois says it was registered by proxy, the Better Business Bureau has no record on that phone number, and neither does Google.
first a nugget of fact, then some commentary:
1. When we moved to Portland, Oregon, we had Qwest come out to the house to rewire one of the phone jacks because the mooks who hooked it up to the outside world crosswired the connections- we didn't even have dial tone. After the tech fixed the problem, first thing he did after confirming DSL sync was to run a speed test. I asked him if that was SOP and he said that he was trained to always run a speed test for new customers- he suggested that it might be part of an upsell but that he doesn't like selling so he never comments (oh, you're only getting 750k down, but you're in an area where 7/1 MB service is available... did you know you can upgrade for just $3.50/month!???? ...). YMMV but if this is SOP for Qwest on installs, there is one population of regular testers.
2. I agree with earlier commenters- there is probably a self-selecting sampling bias.
3. Because of #2, any "data" they collect is probably very skewed towards computer-savvy users who are demanding higher-speed services and using their website to check if the service they're getting matches what they're paying for. Unless there are some details of the methodology that they're not telling us about, the survey probably reports higher bandwidth than actually is delivered to the majority of people with net access in those cities. If it's just a simple aggregation & average of whoever decides to click on speedtest.com from inside a given city's IP range, well, that probably tells you something... but it's probably not a good proxy for a complete picture of "last mile" connectivity.
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
In my experience, it is hard to even imagine 10/2 Mbit/s average performance anywhere in the US; those numbers look way inflated. As the speed tests are short duration bursts, they are not indicative of actual sustained performance.
That's what I'd really like to see. I mean, it doesn't look TOO damning that the US is sitting pretty at 50% of what Japan accomplishes, but let's just take a gander at how their upload pipes compare. I think it would cause some jaws to drop.
when comparing a megabit per dollar, countries with socialized fiber are going to kick the shit out of american "~4 meg broadband"
Many countries (Lithuania, Aland Islands, Ghana for example) have sharp peaks in their reported bandwidth. At first I thought it might be tourism related and thus could be a seasonal thing, but these peaks have a period much longer than a year.
Does anyone have any good ideas on what's causing these peaks?
There's issues with what servers you use. So suppose your ISP gives you a high physical rate connection, 100mbit say. However they have it set up so it is more or less a bigass WAN, they don't have the bandwidth to their providers to back up that kind of rate. You only get like 5mbps out to the net at large. However, your provider runs an Ookla server. So you go to test and that server is the recommended choice. You choose it, and get a 100mbit rate reported because internally, you get that speed. Thus it appears that you have a really fast connection but overall you don't.
I've seen this kind of thing before. In the Scandinavian countries there was (and probably is) a service that went by the initials BBB. This was apparently 10mbits DSL and this was back in like 2001, when such a thing was pretty rare. However I found that any transfer to them was dog slow. Basically, they only got those rates internally. Because of this they noted their connection as being BBB and tended to share files among themselves largely.
Same deal with some of the connections in Japan. I talked with someone on Slashdot who was happy with their 100mbit connection. Said they could download a CD worth in about a minute. I noted that isn't 100mbit speeds, that is a bit over 10mbit speeds. Still plenty fast, but not what the connection claims. I download a CD worth of data in half that time, which makes sense seeing as my connection is 20mbit.
That is actually one of the reasons I like my current net connection. I find in my tests, both specific tests like connection to these servers and general downloading, that I get my rate to locations all over the US and Canada. My provider has bandwidth and peering such that it seems to not be a problem for me to get my full rate to just about anywhere.
So you don't necessarily get a complete picture with this. When looking at broadband speed, there's a lot of questions that need to be considered to really know how it's speed is.
Satellite -- high latency, but can do better than 1.5mbit. Heck, cell towers give better than 1.5mbit down these days. Is there a Verizon tower in your town? Is the town so small it doesn't have a cable company?
I looked into satellite as an alternative to the cheap cable internet at my new apartment. It was going to cost me much more than $30/month to get just 1 Mbps down. Satellite can fill a niche where there's absolutely no service, but it's not always economically feasible compared to landlines.
From what I've read as well, a 3G tower will not beat 1.5 MBps down - I believe it tends to run in the 500K range, don't quote me on that. 4G coverage can actually beat standard cable landlines by quite a bit, but you have to live in a generally well-populated area to get that installed in your neighborhood. Still, I've been hearing good things about Clear or Spring 4G coverage around Houston, so it's a good alternative if you can get it.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
Yes, we have full-timers! Those lucky, lucky folks who don't own/rent a house, they instead live, work, and play full time in their RV's! Is this a great country or what!
Just have to notice:
> Yes, it is kinda weird to see Slovenia top the US....
FTTH. Two companies (T-2 and Telekom) are rolling it heavily, we are 8th world-wide in FTTH penetration.
DOCSIS 3.0. It is hard to see TV antennas: some 70% of people are on the cable networks or watch TV/IP.
Whoever is still on ADSL is considered "poor".
But, some 10% of population has no access to broadband.
73 from Ljubljana
Iztok
Our filter here at work blocks netindex.com under the category "Sex". Being the conspiracy theorist that I am it occurs to me that the best way that an ISP that didn't want you to see this info could keep you from it is to throw it into their filter lists under that category. I am not going to my admin to ask them to whitelist it because the first thing that he is going to ask is "what category is it in?" I don't care about the info that much.
DUDE! Opportunity is knocking! Find the CO in your town (it might be just a shack considering the size). The CO will at least have T1 service. Find a plot of land or someone's roof and set up your own wireless ISP.
The big difference is that the US got widespread ADSL earlier than most countries, and the average density of telco COs is such that it's really hard to get past 3-6 Mbps without running new wires. So what you're really seeing is a reflection of the ratios between houses served by ADSL, Cable Modem, and newer technologies (such as fiber-to-the-home and fiber-to-the-block.)
The real question is what you're going to do with all that bandwidth - Bittorrent will happily use any bandwidth you've got, 3 Mbps is fast enough for YouTube, 56kbps was plenty for email, but basically anybody who's trying to sell you more than 6 Mbps is trying to sell you Television-over-IP to compete with the other providers of "500 channels and nothing on". Television's Boring, and we've already got it - What cool stuff are you using that needs the bandwidth?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I stopped using speedtest.net quite some time ago in favor of speed.uberbandwidth.com because speedtest would always give me slower results than I would get downloading files from any myriad of servers even though their server was closer.
This whole thing is a joke anyway. It implies this stupid argument that somehow a nation is a better place to live because it has faster average internet access.
Sure, your cable modem company is implementing download caps and harassing you for running a server at home because of bad PR problems they had 15 years ago, but if they're using modern equipment they're technically faster than that, and either the Verizon FIOS FFTH or AT&T U-Verse Fiber-to-the-block technologies get you faster as well. The problem is that anything other than telco ADSL is trying to sell you television (since in most places, DSL is good enough to watch YouTube), and they haven't found any more interesting business model to attract customers.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If you look at the quality metric, there are a lot of US cities on the top list. (Fewer packet losses, I think.)
In terms of worst states, downloading, look at Alaska, New Mexico, Wyoming, etc...
Uploading, look pretty much everywhere.
Also, aren't these states skewed toward power users?
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
You're shocked that one of the first places in the US to get broadband internet has people who still have slow connections, in a sprawling semi-mountainous geography where the cable TV networks were built a town at a time rather than all at once by a monopoly and the population's grown substantially since the telco offices were built? If you want to buy a fast cable modem connection in most of the flat parts of Silicon Valley, you can, and if you want to buy AT&T U-Verse Fiber-to-the-block service that's also pretty fast.
I'm still using 3 Mbps DSL, because it's fast enough for YouTube and BitTorrent, I've got more television than I need already, and the cable modem service won't give me a static IP address to run a home web server (though they're starting to be the cutting edge for IPv6.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The reason to have high bandwidth is to do cool stuff with it. 14kbps was fine for email, then 384 for average web, then 1.5M for Napster and gaming, 3 Mbps seems to be plenty to run YouTube and BitTorrent.
The carriers that want to sell me high-speed connections are doing it so they can sell me television, and I've got plenty of television already. When Napster was new, the public position of the cable modem companies was "Content Thieves are EEEVIL", but if you talked to them privately, most of them had enough clue to say "Dude, Napster's the reason people are buying cable modems, we love it!" But these days they don't have anything new and cool to offer, and they're cluelessly talking about bandwidth caps and no-servers-at-home policies to make sure nobody develops anything new or cool.
So what are you doing with your bandwidth that's interesting? I've heard that old people in Korea can use it to look at video from their local grocery store to see what's on sale, but I haven't heard of anything else interesting.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I see they once again dipped into the "candidate organ names for newly discovered species of amphibians" pool. Didn't that fad die out a while ago?
sic transit gloria mundi
That's some very excellent insight.
- - + - + - - +
I don't think you're asking me, but let's assume you are. Most of our family doesn't live here, so I would be using it to keep in touch with them. Additionally I do web development, and would love to be able to work from home.
However, that doesn't fit the mold of what you're describing, because that's a consumer centric purpose. You're describing "what does the vendor get out of it". Because that's what they are everywhere but the US. Vendors. Here, they're providers. Slight difference of name, the difference being in other places the intent is to sell pipe, because there's lots of competition. I visited the south of France last year for two weeks, and I could tell that there was no dearth of competition for home IP service in that short time frame.
However, here in the US, most localities are lucky to have two competing providers (granted, using separate tech often so that each tech only has one local provider).
I like the point. I'm gonna have to remember to bring that up more often in this discussion when I have it with other people.
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I keep having that reaction... Did you not READ the fine article?
The speed test is pretty much "point to point". In my neighbourhood, it is between Scarborough Ontario and Markham Ontario (Canada).
The speed tester automatically picks the nearest server for you, even.
So, it DOESN'T MATTER HOW BIG THE COUNTRY IS. Peering arrangements shouldn't be coming into it either.
By all that is holy, I would expect San Jose to have some damn fine speeds.
I am embarrassed that the Scarborough speeds are so slow.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
That's because ~90% of internet users of are from Ljubljana and the surrounding suburbs, I doubt there are any FTTH installs in Bled =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I know of one major nsp that temporarily gave extra bandwidth to customers when they visited dslreports. That unfairly skewed test results upward. I'd wager they weren't alone..
Looking at the results, I see that countries like Latvia, Moldova, Lithuania, and Bulgaria are starting to show results for upload/download bandwidth which compete with South Korea and Japan.
I predict a big boom in the proxy services based in those and similar countries when people start to think about end runs around more and more laws like "three strikes".
And understand, it doesn't require that everyone uses such a proxy to poke big holes in the **AAs attempts to prevent copyright infringement --- every teenager will know which of his friends knows someone who knows someone who can download safely. If necessary, special "social networking" services will spring up to fill this need (of finding the media infringement "pusher" --- hmm, in this case maybe it should be "puller").
Web space seems to be getting very cheap, to the point that people have no problems sharing 50MB PDF files and 200 page Word documents with tons of embedded images.
When you're in a rush to get out of the house and need access to that document on the train ride to work/school (which is, in my case, mainly covered only by EDGE if not GPRS), being able to download the same file in 25 seconds instead of 5 minutes is a godsend.
Sure, you won't need something like this for day-to-day web browsing, but there _are_ some time-critical applications. Even when I'm just downloading PDFs or programs like Serenade/Packet Tracer/MSDNAA-stuff off of my Uni's servers, I'm incredibly glad to have a relatively fast DSL line, because it allows me to save a lot of time.
Also, a larger upload pipe usually goes hand-in-hand with the higher downstream - I've got 16Mbps (about 1.8MByte/sec effective... depending on the server, obviously) downstream, which is just fine, but my upload is only 1Mbps. For VPN and other purposes, that's just too slow...
The carriers that want to sell me high-speed connections are doing it so they can sell me television, and I've got plenty of television already. When Napster was new, the public position of the cable modem companies was "Content Thieves are EEEVIL", but if you talked to them privately, most of them had enough clue to say "Dude, Napster's the reason people are buying cable modems, we love it!" But these days they don't have anything new and cool to offer, and they're cluelessly talking about bandwidth caps and no-servers-at-home policies to make sure nobody develops anything new or cool.
So what are you doing with your bandwidth that's interesting? I've heard that old people in Korea can use it to look at video from their local grocery store to see what's on sale, but I haven't heard of anything else interesting
As someone who recently got an upgrade from 22/2,5 to 50/5 (ISP's idea, not mine. They need to compete) I grab my shot of the Daily Show from the web, some south park, download fan-made projects at dazzling speeds, get updates for MMO's as well as software that is sold primarliy online like indie titles. I can download a 50 minute show in less time than it takes to pop downstairs to prepare a snack.
3 Mbps? Wow...I can't even remember the last time I had to deal with that kind of speed...and while that might be enough for doing 1 thing at a time...some households have more than 1 person in it, and they all want to use the web in the evenings.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
So then compare Canada with the Northeast Corridor (Boston, New York City, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Delaware, Baltimore, DC, Richmond).
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
For example, Comcast has an initial burst speed in the range of 20 - 16 megabits per second. However, all to soon one passes a modestly set download quantity and the rate drops to its usual mediocre levels. I suspect, based upon my experience running a test, this fictional rate is seen as the base rate offered and published as such.
You know one former east-bloc country you never hear about in any news stories? Bulgaria. Nothing about government corruption or suppression (unless they're 100% effective) or ethnic strife and retribution. Not a peep. Odd.
I am a gamer. Given suffiecient up- and down speed (say 1Mbit/s), I don't care about link speed.
Latency is much more important for a good online game experience. I know many people who have a faster internet connection for less money, but also have horrible ping times to game servers...
- Bertus
problem with these tests is that the speed testers do not saturate the connections and show single thread connection speeds. if i saturate my connection in halifax, ns i get 13mbps easy.
The graphs at the Ookla Net Index are totally worthless.
They demonstrate very crude trends, but without units on the time axis, who is to say if the increases are over the last day, month, year? Oh, wait, you have to read the sole paragraph of introductory text on an otherwise graphic page to learn that the graphs are rolling averages over the last 30 days. Silly me, instead of just finding it out from the graph, I was supposed to read something.
The vertical axes likewise have no units - all you are told is the maximum value (i.e., the intercept at the right-side y-axis). We have no idea what the minimum value of the y-axis is. What is more, the y-axis scaling for all the graphs isn't consistent. If the maximum value of the South Korea graph is 34 mbps, then that should be the scale factor used for all the other graphs, such that the maximum value for the Netherlands, 17 mbps, should be about half as tall. Instead, each graph is individually scaled so that the graph intersects the right-side y-axis at 90% height, making any graph-to-graph comparison impossible. Better yet, graph all the countries on a single plot, so that the relative speeds among countries are blazingly apparent along with the trends.
Without units on the graphs, the graphs add almost no value to the single number given to each country.
They should have a look at any stock quote service and learn how to convey information from that. Here's a suggestion. See how nice and labeled the axes are? Look, you can expand the axes to see not just the last month, but any segment of the total historical dataset. Want to overlay how one stock does against another, here ya go.
The 50 States map is pretty and all, but there isn't a scale that says what shade of orange/brown corresponds to what speed. Hover over a state and you get a number - but again with no units. Montana = 5.02. Whoopdie-freakin' do. 5.02 what? Mbps is the implied unit. But how do we know it's not density of internet users / sq km, or percentage of internet users that have taken their tests, or absolute number of testers, or per-capita consumption of french fries.
In many cases, the *potential* for a fast connection may be there, but the ISP is constantly throttling and shaping traffic so that you don't reach anywhere close to that potential except very special cases.
For speed tests, ISP's have been known to give the more well known ones a very high priority. That means that when you go to speedtest.net, you'll see uber-fast speeds. However when you're browsing elsewhere or doing something that actually requires such speed (especially torrenting, etc), you're throttled back and actually get only a small portion of the speed.
Maybe the speed test sites should add an option where they open a torrent connection to a bunch of fixed seeds and see how fast you can download/upload, then compare it against other traffic. Now *that* would be an interesting test.
Really, interactive television (broadly defined) is everything, since the main interface between the user and computer is a screen. Once you can drive the screen remotely, why does somebody need a PC or game console in their home, instead of leasing them as services? Economics may push us in that direction, if bandwidth is cheap enough. For example, my game console is only used a few hours per week, and its value will depreciate to nothing before it's worn out. So I should be able to get the same utility for 1/Nth the price by leasing the service from somebody who oversubscribes their game console pool by a factor of N.
I get ~24k from clearwire when its working. The trouble is, if you look at the terms&conditions for most ISPs, they are not at all required to provide any kind of service whatsoever, you are not entitled to get your money back in any case. If you sign up, you lose. No internet connection at all is better than no internet connection most of the time for $55 a month. The nice thing is, if you refuse to pay they can go and ruin your credit completely. They should all be rounded up and shot. WTF is the article about?
Yes, it is available in Bled.
I heard this one:
Telekom installers were bringing fiber to the house in the mountain.
Old man asked them: what are you doing? And they answered by telling about internet.
And then he said: Nice, but I would prefer if you bring power lines as well.
BR
Iztok
I get just over 1Mb and it is fine for just about anything. I stream Netflix at 3 to 4 bars. Youtube and torrents run fine, if a bit slow. More bandwidth would allow either better quality streams, or people to game or surf while Netflix is streaming. I don't know why they say everyone needs a ton of bandwidth. 1Mb is very serviceable.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
When Speedtest.net shows my upload speed, it goes up to 0.5Mb/s, stays there for a while (until about 3/4 of the way) and then immediately drops to 0.3Mb/s and stays there for the rest of the test.
Can anyone explain this behaviour? Throttling?
If you're killing your upstream, you need a router that's better at prioritizing the different traffic streams so you don't do that - or at least you need to limit the upstream bandwidth from your DVD uploading application so it doesn't choke everybody else.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Other than greed, which I'm not going to argue about (:-), ISPs really really don't want everybody downloading individual copies of TV shows - they want to be able to multicast the channels of TV to your local central office or cable head-end and fan out from there, so they can use 1-2 Gbps to get a few hundred channels as opposed to hundreds of times that much bandwidth.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
From the vendor's/provider's perspective, if they're going to spend a lot of money to upgrade their infrastructure, their motivation is to get their existing customers to spend a lot more money, or to steal customers from the other providers - either way there needs to be something cool to do with the bandwidth to get them to move. If the killer app they're really selling is television, there are typically two satellite TV providers in addition to the telco and cable ISPs, but television is IMHO still boring.
For keeping in touch with family, my family mostly uses email (and phones), though my sisters sometimes do video conferencing, which is well under 1Mbps. The amount of bandwidth you need to work from home may vary - you need to be able to experience what people viewing your site will experience, plus upload any content, monitor servers, etc., so that's going to depend a lot on whether your site does video or just text and images. VPNs don't burn a lot of extra bandwidth, and you could always run a remote-screen app like VNC or Citrix to a server at the office for some things.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Yes, but it's the upstream that's important for running things like VNC or for uploading files, and my upstream SUCKS.
Same works for video conferencing. If you can't get the video ONTO the pipe, the other end can't get it any faster. And there's always overhead for two way communication, so the busier the household, the less room there is for either overhead or data, and generally it's the data that suffers.
So yeah, the DSL speed is tantamount to using the internet for anything useful. What were you saying again? Oh yeah, must be nice to live in a town of more than 300 residents... (Yes, I got myself into the mess, but I wouldn't mind so much if I could subsidize the cost of the telco to upgrade their own equipment voluntarily)
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