[Make-wifi-fast] Bufferbloat on Norwegian train wifi

[Toke Høiland-Jørgensen]

Michael Yartys <michael.yartys at protonmail.com> writes:

> Wow, those are some truly crappy networks!

Yeah, 'bloat-bragging' seems to have become quite the sport on these
mailing lists ;)

> I'll try to contact Vy to get them to do something about it. I wonder
> how much of this might be due to the equipment on their trains though.
> I decided to measure the bufferbloat on the LTE network in my
> neighbourhood, and on average I got 300 ms above baseline while
> running an 8-stream TCP download. Then again, I ran this test with my
> phone acting as a hotspot, and the results might be affected by that.
> Does anybody know if this methodology produces reliable results? I
> presume that even the very short peak of 86 Mbps shouldn't really
> cause much WiFi-related bufferbloat.

Hard to say from first principles. 300ms doesn't sound unrealistic for
bloat on an LTE network and if you have a good WiFi connection on your
phone the WiFI link *shouldn't* be a bottleneck. But it's hard to know
for sure; just too many variables.

I guess you could try running a speedtest on your phone while you have a
ping running from your tethered laptop. Not sure how effective the
app-based speedtests are at inducing bloat, though; they're certanly not
measuring it...

-Toke