[LibreQoS] [Rpm] [EXTERNAL] Re: [Starlink] Researchers Seeking Probe Volunteers in USA

[dan]

I'm not offering a complete solution here....  I'm not so keen on
speed tests.  It's akin to testing your car's performance by flooring
it til you hit the governor and hard breaking til you stop *while in
traffic*.   That doesn't demonstrate the utility of the car.

Data is already being transferred, let's measure that.    Doing some
routine simple tests intentionally during low, mid, high congestion
periods to see how the service is actually performing for the end
user.  You don't need to generate the traffic on a link to measure how
much traffic a link can handle.  And determining congestion on a
service in a fairly rudimentary way would be frequent latency tests to
'known good' service ie high capacity services that are unlikely to
experience congestion.

There are few use cases that matche a 2 minute speed test outside of
'wonder what my internet connection can do'.  And in those few use
cases such as a big file download, a routine latency test is a really
great measure of the quality of a service.  Sure, troubleshooting by
the ISP might include a full bore multi-minute speed test but that's
really not useful for the consumer.

Further, exposing this data to the end users, IMO, is likely better as
a chart of congestion and flow durations and some scoring.  ie, slice
out 7-8pm, during this segment you were able to pull 427Mbps without
congestion, netflix or streaming service use approximately 6% of
capacity.  Your service was busy for 100% of this time ( likely
measuring buffer bloat ).    Expressed as a pretty chart with consumer
friendly language.


When you guys are talking about per segment latency testing, you're
really talking about metrics for operators to be concerned with, not
end users.  It's useless information for them.  I had a woman about 2
months ago complain about her frame rates because her internet
connection was 15 emm ess's and that was terrible and I needed to fix
it.  (slow computer was the problem, obviously) but that data from
speedtest.net didn't actually help her at all, it just confused her.

Running timed speed tests at 3am (Eero, I'm looking at you) is pretty
pointless.  Running speed tests during busy hours is a little bit
harmful overall considering it's pushing into oversells on every ISP.

I could talk endlessly about how useless speed tests are to end user experience.


On Mon, Jan 9, 2023 at 12:20 PM rjmcmahon via LibreQoS
<libreqos at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>
> User based, long duration tests seem fundamentally flawed. QoE for users
> is driven by user expectations. And if a user won't wait on a long test
> they for sure aren't going to wait minutes for a web page download. If
> it's a long duration use case, e.g. a file download, then latency isn't
> typically driving QoE.
>
> Not: Even for internal tests, we try to keep our automated tests down to
> 2 seconds. There are reasons to test for minutes (things like phy cals
> in our chips) but it's more of the exception than the rule.
>
> Bob
> >> 0) None of the tests last long enough.
> >
> > The user-initiated ones tend to be shorter - likely because the
> > average user does not want to wait several minutes for a test to
> > complete. But IMO this is where a test platform like SamKnows, Ookla's
> > embedded client, NetMicroscope, and others can come in - since they
> > run in the background on some randomized schedule w/o user
> > intervention. Thus, the user's time-sensitivity is no longer a factor
> > and a longer duration test can be performed.
> >
> >> 1) Not testing up + down + ping at the same time
> >
> > You should consider publishing a LUL BCP I-D in the IRTF/IETF - like in
> > IPPM...
> >
> > JL
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Rpm at lists.bufferbloat.net
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