[Bloat] Speed tests - attribution of latency to relevant network hops

[Jan Ceuleers]

Dear list,

Now that dslreports has set the benchmark on combining speed testing
with latency measurements I was thinking about what the next steps could
be. Here's what I came up with:

Would it be useful to try and attribute the latency to certain relevant
network hops, like so:

First hop: round-trip latency of the link connecting the user's machine
to their local network. This could be wifi or Ethernet in a home or
office environment; it could be wifi or cellular in a public
environment, etc.

Local network: round-trip latency to the first upstream port that has a
public IP address. Of course this is only useful if the user's machine
doesn't already have a routable IP address.

ISP: round-trip latency to the second upstream port that has a public IP
address. So this would be the DSLAM/BRAS/CMTS or whatever access
concentrator the ISP uses.

This would probably need to be based on ping. Which IP addresses to ping
would initially need to be found out through traceroute-like methods.

If we can then get users to tell us not only what Internet access
technology they use (i.e. cable, DSL, GPON etc) but also what local
access technology (i.e. wifi, Ethernet etc) we'd know how to attribute
the above numbers to technologies.

Jan