[Bloat] We built a new bufferbloat test and keen for feedback

[Sam Westwood <sam@repeaterstore.com>]

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Hi everyone,

My name is Sam and I'm the co-founder and COO of Waveform.com. At Waveform
we provide equipment to help improve cell phone service, and being in the
industry we've always been interested in all aspects of network
connectivity. Bufferbloat for us has always been interesting, and while
there are a few tests out there we never found one that was fantastic. So
we thought we'd try and build one!

My colleague Arshan has built the test, which we based upon the Cloudflare
Speedtest template that was discussed earlier in the summer in a previous
thread.

We measure bufferbloat under two conditions: when downlink is saturated and
when uplink is saturated. The test involves three stages: Unloaded,
Downlink Saturated, and Uplink Saturated. In the first stage we simply
measure latency to a file hosted on a CDN. This is usually around 5ms and
could vary a bit based on the user's location. We use the webTiming API to
find the time-to-first-byte, and consider that as the latency. In the
second stage we run a download, while simultaneously measuring latency. In
the third stage we do the same but for upload. Both download and upload
usually take around 5 seconds. We show the median, first quartile and the
third quartile on distribution charts corresponding to each stage to
provide a visual representation of the latency variations. For download and
upload we have used Cloudflare's speedtest backend.

You can find the test here: https://www.waveform.com/apps/dev-arshan

We built testing it on Chrome, but it works on Firefox and mobile too. On
mobile results may be a little different, as the APIs aren't available and
so instead we implemented a more manual method, which can be a little
noisier.

This is a really early alpha, and so we are keen to get any and all
feedback you have :-). Things that we would particularly like feedback on:

   - How does the bufferbloat measure compare to other tests you may have
   run on the same connection (e.g. dslreports, fast.com)
   - How the throughput results (download/upload/latency) look compared to
   other tools
   - Any feedback on the user interface of the test itself? We know that
   before releasing more widely we will put more effort into explaining
   bufferbloat than we have so far.
   - Anything else you would like to give feedback on?

We have added a feature to share results via a URL, so please feel free to
share these if you have specific feedback.

Thanks!
Sam and Arshan

*************************
Sam Westwood
Co-Founder & COO | RSRF & Waveform
E   sam@waveform.com
D   (949) 207-3175
T   1-800-761-3041 Ext. 100
W   www.rsrf.com & www.waveform.com

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