[atlas] Speed tests?

On 7 June 2014 08:25, Lars-Johan Liman <atlas at liman.net> wrote:
> brak at 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.

-- 
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