[Bloat] SIMET: nationwide bw/latency/jitter test effort in Brazil

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh@hmh.eng.br>]

On Sun, 20 Jul 2014, Rich Brown wrote:
> Now if we could get them to a) allow longer/bigger tests to circumvent
> PowerBoost, and b) include a latency measurement so people could point out
> their bufferbloated equipment. 

You may find this interesting:

http://simet.nic.br/

NIC.br has it deployed nation-wide in Brazil, with remote endpoint servers
in most public IXPs ("PTTMetro" IXPs, which are also managed by NIC.br).

The end user client is available over the web (java applet), and also as a
mobile app for Android and iOS.  There's also an openwrt-based firmware for
a very inexpensive home-router box ("SIMET box"), which they've been giving
out to the general public so as to increase their test coverage.

SIMET does bandwidth (TCP and UDP) as well as latency and jitter
measurements, but it doesn't attempt to measure bufferbloat so I never
thought of mentioning it around here.

One interesting detail is that SIMET measurements are trusted (as in "can
have legal standing in Brazil"): the SIMET system is certified[1] by
INMETRO, Brazil's national body for scientific, industrial and legal
metrology.

There's not much material in english about SIMET, unfortunately.

Outside of Brazil, I like the Berkeley ICSI Netalyzr
(http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/).  VERY comprehensive measurements and
several network diagnostics... and it does measure worst-case steady-state
latency (aka bufferbloat).

[1] "certified" is not exactly correct.  I don't know an exact word in
english for "has been verified to be correctly calibrated in accordance with
the official measurement standards and procedures", in portuguese:
"aferido".

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh