[Starlink] [Bloat] [Rpm] the grinch meets cloudflare's christmas present

[Sebastian Moeller]

Hi Bob,


> On Jan 4, 2023, at 21:02, rjmcmahon via Bloat <bloat at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
> 
> Curious to why people keep calling capacity tests speed tests? A semi at 55 mph isn't faster than a porsche at 141 mph because its load volume is larger.

	[SM] I am not sure whether answering the "why" is likely to getting us closer to remedy the situation. IMHO we are unlikely to change that just as we are unlikely to change the equally debatable use of "bandwidth" as synonym for "maximal capacity"... These two ships have sailed no matter how much shouting at clouds is going to happen ;)

My theory about the way is, this is entirely marketing driven, both device manufacturers/ISPs and end-users desire to keep things simple so ideally a single number and a catchy name... "Speed" as in top-speed was already a well known quantity for motor vehicles that consumers as a group had accepted to correlate with price. Now purist will say that "speed" is already well-defined as distance/time and "amount of data" is not a viable distance measure (how many bits are there in a meter?), but since when has marketing and the desire for simply single-number "quality indicators" ever cared much for the complexities of the real world?
	Also when remembering the old analog modem and ISDN days, at that time additional capacity truly was my main desirable, so marketing by max capacity was relevant to me independent of how this was called, I would not be amazed if I was not alone with that view. I guess that single measure and the wrong name simply stuck...

Personally I try to use rate instead of speed or bandwidth, but I note that I occasionally fail without even noticing it.

Technically I agree that one way latency is more closely related to "speed" as between any two end-points there is always a path the information travels that has a "true" length, so speed could be defined as network-path-length/OWD, but that would only be the average speed over the path... I am not sure how informative or marketable this wuld be for end-users though ;)


Regards
	Sebastian



> 
> Bob
>> HNY Dave and all the rest,
>> Great to see yet another capacity test add latency metrics to the
>> results. This one looks like a good start.
>> Results from my Windstream DOCSIS 3.1 line (3.1 on download only, up
>> is 3.0) Gigabit down / 35Mbps up provisioning. Using an IQrouter Pro
>> (an i5 x86) with Cake set for 710/31 as this ISP can’t deliver
>> reliable low-latency unless you shave a good bit off the targets. My
>> local loop is pretty congested.
>> Here’s the latest Cloudflare test:
>> And an Ookla test run just afterward:
>> They are definitely both in the ballpark and correspond to other tests
>> run from the router itself or my (wired) MacBook Pro.
>> Cheers,
>> Jonathan
>>> On Jan 4, 2023, at 12:26 PM, Dave Taht via Rpm <rpm at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>>> Please try the new, the shiny, the really wonderful test here:
>>> https://speed.cloudflare.com/
>>> I would really appreciate some independent verification of
>>> measurements using this tool. In my brief experiments it appears - as
>>> all the commercial tools to date - to dramatically understate the
>>> bufferbloat, on my LTE, (and my starlink terminal is out being
>>> hacked^H^H^H^H^H^Hworked on, so I can't measure that)
>>> My test of their test reports 223ms 5G latency under load , where
>>> flent reports over 2seconds. See comparison attached.
>>> My guess is that this otherwise lovely new  tool, like too many,
>>> doesn't run for long enough. Admittedly, most web objects (their
>>> target market) are small, and so long as they remain small and not
>>> heavily pipelined this test is a very good start... but I'm pretty
>>> sure cloudflare is used for bigger uploads and downloads than that.
>>> There's no way to change the test to run longer either.
>>> I'd love to get some results from other networks (compared as usual to
>>> flent), especially ones with cake on it. I'd love to know if they
>>> measured more minimum rtts that can be obtained with fq_codel or cake,
>>> correctly.
>>> Love Always,
>>> The Grinch
>>> --
>>> This song goes out to all the folk that thought Stadia would work:
>>> https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dtaht_the-mushroom-song-activity-6981366665607352320-FXtz
>>> Dave Täht CEO, TekLibre, LLC
>>> <image.png><tcp_nup-2023-01-04T090937.211620.LTE.flent.gz>_______________________________________________
>>> Rpm mailing list
>>> Rpm at lists.bufferbloat.net
>>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/rpm
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