[atlas] Speed tests?

On 6.06.14 18:07 , Brian Rak wrote:
> 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.

RIPE Atlas is not intended to be a last-mile bandwidth measuring tool.
Atlas is about the network behind the first mile. There are others who
do bandwidth very well, speedtest and samknows are among them.

The last mile is not where the challenges of the future are and in many
parts of the world it is not where the challenges are even now.

Because of this Atlas is not designed to measure local connection
bandwidth and hence it cannot do a good job at this. For example one of
the connections at my house in a small village today has a downstream
bandwidth of 180Mbit/s; the physical interface of the newest v3 probes
is limited to 100Mbit/s; the v1 and v2 probes by far do not have the CPU
to generate packets fast enough to saturate even their 100Mbit/s
physical connections.

Also we may irritate quite some hosts who have not signed up for their
RIPE Atlas probe to use significant amounts of bandwidth. Some of the
reactions on this list confirm that.

All this is reason enough for us not to do "download speed" however
great the temptation may be

Daniel

advisor to the RIPE Atlas team
one of the "founders" of RIPE Atlas