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..."

Comments

The US looks pretty terrible.

[Miros]

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?

Re:The US looks pretty terrible.

[v1]

The US's upload speed has always stunk. Makes it impractical for most casual admins to run a small private server for friends or even personal use. Stinks when you want to remote to your house to grab a file, where you have 20mbps downstream, and only 768kbps upstream and it just takes forever to grab the file.

Or you can get your wallet totally shafted by your isp if they do offer higher tiers of upstream. Double your speed usually triples to quadruples your monthly cost, and you're usually starting from dirt. (256k to at best 2m)

I pay three times the usual rate at my house because I want their "premium" 2mbps (1.5 actual) instead of the totally useless 384k. (and that's with 10-20m down being standard)

That's an annoying racket they have going with upstream. Problem is, the majority of people that really need high upstream are businesses that need it for employee offsite email and remoting into work, uploading files to customers, etc. So ISPs milk you hard because they expect you to have money to burn.

Re:The US looks pretty terrible.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been homeless within the last 4 years, and NO I am not one of the mentally ill, nor a drug addict.
All it takes in the USA to become homeless is a little bad luck, an accident or severe illness.

I was one of the permatemps working at Shure electronics when I had an uninsured (the temp agency required 6000+ hours before insurance was available, that's right 3 years for a job with dangerous heavy machinery) on the job accident, minor really only three stiches. Unfortunetely for me, the other idiots on the other shifts had been spitting in the coolant of the CNC machine I had been running. I ended up with a virus with an affinity for nervous system tissue( read that as herpes simplex) and ended up five days later in a coma from Acute Viral Encephalitis. The asshats at Shure called the temp service (long out of business now) and had me fired for not showing up to work (nocall no show they said). They had been informed by my ex that I was very ill on the first night and knew I was in dire straits.

For the assholes who cry out "Sue!" Just how would you propose to prove the the virus came from Shure's CNC machine when the coolant was changed while I was in a coma? Even if the virus was detectable, how could I prove it didn't come from my blood?

What difference would it make, HSE is always ultimately terminal.

The hospital was just as much a clusterfuck. $15,000 per day for bedspace in ICU. All the different doctors fees, expensive random testing of various things. A "social worker" who was more bill collector than helpful. "There's nothing we can do for a white male" she told me. Outrageous! and yes Illegal.I thought she was going to help me try to fill out the forms to try to get Social Security Disability, boy was I wrong.(hah ha) Hell I couldn't read or write and could barely stand at that point, I hadn't even been discharged from the hospital yet.
Not a dime to those assholes.

If you think your significant other will stay with you through time like these, then you are luckier than I was.
Rehab all on my own, no hospitals or professionals involved.
Chicago winters with no heat and no electricity. Eventually the house was taken too.
Social Security Disability denied twice but allowed on the third try. 3-1/2 years after the coma.

My estranged mother was in charge of my money(brain damage, I wasn't allowed to be in charge of my finances). She stole it all and kicked me out, three months after I finally got Disability. -5F (that's -20C for you metric thinkers) on the night I became homeless again.

AND you guys want to whine about the state of broadband!

Re:The US looks pretty terrible.

[mikael_j]

Ok, so how come us Swedes mostly started to go online in the mid-90s (using regular old dialup), then everyone but the college students who were on 10 Mbps SUNET connections switched to ADSL (at that time mostly g.dmt) or DOCSIS connections, then "everyone" switched to ADSL2+ and the DOCSIS networks began to disappear (except ComHem who kept upping the speed of their network to stay competitive) and the whole time fiber connections have become more and more common (ten years ago 10/10 Mbps was the "standard" for what you could get with a fiber connection, today it's 100/100 Mbps with some people having access to 1000/1000 Mbps)?

By your reasoning we should all still be stuck on dialup or first-gen (g.dmt) ADSL. Especially when you consider our low population density...

Re:The US looks pretty terrible.

[mikael_j]

The EU is not a nation, most ISPs do not freely operate across the borders of different European countries (although some do operate in neighboring countries, like Telenor in Sweden and Norway and TeliaSonera in Finland and Sweden).

Also, by lumping all of Europe together you're basically trying to lower the higher speeds of some countries by throwing them in with low performers like Greece, Spain and Italy (I don't think most europeans needed netindex.com to know that these guys have fairly crappy internet infrastructure, anyone who's ever been there on vacation could tell you that, to paraphrase a description of Italy from a swede who went there a few years ago "Italy is like being in the dark ages with mopeds and indoor plumbing that occasionally works, I will never understand how these people made it into the G8").

the plural of "anecdote"

[oliphaunt]

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.

Re:What?

[$pace6host]

When I tried it, it misidentified my ISP, picked a server ~20 miles away, but only reported half the speed that dslreports.com shows when testing from a server 100 miles away (and the speed I get from dslreports.com is close to what I see when downloading files). I think maybe when it misidentifies the ISP, peering arrangements might come into play. I wonder how often it does that and how accurate the data really is.