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Europeans Needed To Create Broadband Performance Measure
An anonymous reader writes "The European Commission has launched a project to recruit 10,000 volunteers across Europe to measure the performance of their broadband connection over two years. The trial, believed to be the world's biggest follows similar projects in the US and the UK, run by the EC's partner SamKnows. The data collected will be used to plan the next generation of services. Those interested in signing up to take part can do so here."
Who else thinks this sounds like one gigantic pirate trap?
samknows.eu is the URL. Which is sort of a creepy sign right there I think.
Will these folks be blessed with any rights of immunity, against anything that is dug up? Might be a good method for a TOR onion router perhaps.
From the samknows FAQ:
The SamKnows Whitebox currently performs the following tests:
Multi-threaded HTTP download speed test
Multi-threaded HTTP based upload speed test
Availability of the connection
Jitter
Latency (both ICMP and UDP)
Packet loss (both ICMP and UDP)
DNS query resolution time
DNS query failure rate
Web page loading time
Web page loading failure rate
Video streaming performance
Still not comprehensive, no mention of encrypted traffic speed test or upload specific tests (Upload speed in UK tends to be a small fraction of download speed).
I'll bet it doesn't test for throttling because it'd have to push through too much data and some people with data-caps would complain.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
You know those web sites which have existed as small, specific operations doing one or two things well for as long as you can remember? Always looking a little amateurish but getting the job done.
And you know how one day suddenly their web site goes all corporate and the old services are just sidelines? Looking slick but now seemingly just providing expensive consulting services.
And the following year they're doing something absolutely huge, like the fat kid known for baking tasty cakes who has just been given the job of head chef at the most famous restaurant in the land?
What's up with that?
By that measure, anyone who has a care that goes from A to B should be happy, no matter how much they paid - whether or not the thing jerks like a kangaroo down the road, puffs out black smoke, or consumes twice as much petrol as others.
I believe this experiment is more about getting some numbers that can be used to combat the "Unlimited" downloads, "Up to 10Mbps" etc. advertising. When you have to provide a MINIMUM 10Mbps service, you start having to do things like: fixing your system to provide timely access when all your subscribers are maxing out the connection, not lying about how many people can get your service, having to service lines that are substandard. Although just having a 10Mbps doesn't cure anything directly (because latency could be through the roof etc.), it stops a lot of dirty tricks and if you MUST provide a certain level of service, you can't just go making the latency or other factors unbearable in order to do so because you'll just lose customers. But if you're the only ISP in an area and only advertised "Up to 2MBps", you can pretty much do what you like at the moment.
It's a first step and, more importantly, means that someone wants to check all these ludicrous claims. Access to the Internet just became a "need" that has to be strictly regulated as regards claims because now we know that the EU are watching.
And to be honest, how on Earth do you think you'll ever get a reasonable standard if ANYONE'S opinion on "I can watch YouTube or not stands?" It would just mean they'd make YouTube videos run at 5fps and everyone would be happy? There's truth in numbers, if you collect the right ones and analyse them properly. I would guess that the "black-box" which they want to put into homes not only measures bandwidth but latency, routing issues, etc. too
http://www.measurementlab.net/
How the hell we are still "measuring" throughput, packet loss and RTT in 2011????
My wife want to know if she can "WATCH YOUTUBE" , "SEND A PICTURE VIA EMAIL", "PLAY HER FAVORITE SHOW ON TV".
It's like the PC. People don't care about how many GHz, GB, Mcolors the box has. They care about what they can do...
It's like for cars: who's interested in checking the engine, knowing which brakes and knowing the maximum speed...
It's really time to get rid of this sticky measures...
throughput: Can it play a 1080p streaming video, or will it give up at 480p?
RTT: How well will my real-time online game work?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Ok, you don't understand what the point is here - it's not "to find out how good Facebook is on this ISP", it's to find out "how the ISP network performs". These internet sites are built to work within particular expected constraints - jitter, latency, upload bla bla. So measuring this can tell you how well today's, and tomorrow's internet sites will work. Any other measure will be dependant on the load of the particular youtube/facebook server at that moment in time, and so that's terribly unreliable.
I have some confidence that this test will actually be used to improve services to customers. For example, the EU over the last couple of years has come down hard on the telecom industry, forcing them simply to become cheaper and to improve services.
It seems that although the EU takes 1984 as a guidebook rather than an example, they at least realize that its citizens must have an affordable and good quality information infrastructure if they want anything to eavesdrop on :-)
Sweden has had something like this for at least five years, only not hardware-based via the tptest and now bredbandskollen.se. You can filter the statistics per region, isp or speed. This initiative seems a bit more thorough though, but I wonder how much info will be possible to glean from that anyhow.
Worst category for fulfilling its promises is apparently "500-1000Mbit fibre" in Sweden with a 93% "not accetable" rating. Now, the speed info is up to the user to provide so I am assuming most are just selecting the wrong thing. What worrying is 60-100Mbit fibre also has bad statistics, which is odd considering I never really hear of people with this configuration that has any severe problems.
This is just yet another swill trough project to keep worthless unelected bean counters in paid lunches for two years, plus the half decade that it'll take to draw up the Directive that will inevitably just mandate whatever Germany plans to do anyway.
So take your little spy boxes and hand them out to Frankfurters. They'll happily plug them in, they love obeying orders.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Woha, I thought this was an _additional_ thing you just hang off of your current router. But they want to BE your router, and for you to connect everything via their box! That is wrong on so many levels.
You want a car analogy? Here, Samknows and mlab have already made one for you: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnIVMfBP4So
Europeans need help with more than just their broadband.
Careful! It's a trap! They'll push on you some disgusting music and then close your connection under HADOPI.
They always like to play with their new shiny weapons, you know?
n/t
You can check your connection speed against Sweden here:
http://www.bredbandskollen.se/
Why waste a fortune on measuring internet speed by HARDWARE (seriously, what's the point of that?) instead of using something like these numbers ?