On 7 June 2014 08:25, Lars-Johan Liman <atlas@liman.net> wrote:
brak@gameservers.com:
Are there any plans to allow testing download speed from the probes? I guess this could cause problems for people who have the probes on metered bandwidth plans.
My SEK 0.02 to the Atlas admin is plese don't go that way. That would be a very safe way to have me yank my probe out effective 0.1 seconds from me getting the news.
same here - my probe is on an expensive metered bandwidth line and I simply cannot allow even moderate probe usage, though I am happy for it to be used for anything else that does not incur me financial loss. Indeed the ISP I have connected the probe to is one of the best in the UK, if not the best, which is precisely why I have the probe on that line and not on others. The ISP on that line is an excellent high-quality, but this costs far more than a "normal" ISP, especially in peak daytime. The line is dedicated to VoIP and emergency use only due to the cost, with usage consistently 2GB per month, for a cost of around 50 Euro plus PSTN rental. Breaking through the 2.5GB barrier will add to the monthly cost and put me into the next price band upwards. The line is well worth the current cost because the ISP is brilliant and offers some unique advanced services, as well as IPv6 which is a requirement for me and very hard to find in the UK. I have a consumer-grade ISP at that site is unmetered, but performance is quite frankly terrible - a fact that may even skew result if bandwidth testing is introduced across the board. The consumer-grade ISP is heavily filtered, has CG--NAT, is oversubscribed and has terrible jitter and reliability with long engineering outages at ISP level, but it only costs 17 Euro a month (plus PSTN rental) for an "unlimited" service. It struggles with VoIP and video streaming, which get worse at peak times. "No Fault Found" is the ISP's report in response to fault-finding (that I was billed for) - this is simply normal service from the ISP in question. eg: I get far better perfomance metrics on my ADSL2+ high quality line than a consumer FTTC package at the same site, with cables in the same street bundle. Distance to the exchange for the ADSL2+ is twice (180m) the distance to the VDSL2 street cabinet 80m) yet the ADSL2+ line has faster download speeds from all servers by at least 20%, 24/7, than the VDSL2 80Mbps-down/20Mbps-up FTTC line it sits next to. Both lines consistently sync at max speed, and the FTTC uplink regularly gets 16Mbps real-world uplink rate, faster than the downlink :) This pattern is repeated across several sites for the same ISP on the FTTC connections, though the disparity varied according to which exchange the lines (all site have the same two 1x ADSL2+ and 1x VDSL2+) are connected to. All lines are short, because the premises were specially selected for proximity to the exchange. With unusual disparities between ISPs on similar lines like these examples, I fully agree there is a need for competent independent testing, especially of UK consumer-grade ISPs, just not on my Atlas probe on my expensive line ;) I deliberately have the probe connected to the high quality ISP because I know that the probe is connected to a reliable ISP that has no reachability issues, so it should prove a good reference for other probes on consumer lines in the UK. Anyone measuring download speed metrics on UK consumer-grade ISPs may be in for a surprise, but I don't believe that the Atlas project is the correct tool to do that. -- sent via Gmail web interface, so please excuse my gross neglect of Netiquette