[LINK] Net firms quizzed on speed limits - BBC News

[Geoff Huston]

About the only tool I've seen in recent times that can measure available 
capacity is BitTorrent. Most of the reasons why network transactions are 
slow have not all that much to do with bandwidth per se and have lot to 
do with latency, jitter, application design and the (woeful) quality of 
many protocol stacks in use in popularly deployed clients and servers.

But then again why should mundane aspects of technology get in the way 
of a good "consumers are being duped" story in the popular press?

:-)

    Geoff



Richard Chirgwin wrote:
> Ahh, that old saw again.
> 
> Things that don't run to their maximum rated capacity all the time (off 
> the top of my head):
> Cars (can do 160 km/h, don't)
> Computers
> Ethernet (can run gigabits/second, but most connections are idle most of 
> the time)
> Wireless Ethernet (sold on line speed, perform by "maximum throughput", 
> mostly idle most of the time)
> ...and so on.
> 
> The problem is: what *do* you sell broadband on? The "minimum" speed may 
> be zero. Or realistically, the average per-user throughput is in tens of 
> Kbps.
> 
> Further: the "speed test" performance may not even reflect badly on your 
> service provider; there may well be congestion between you and the speed 
> test; or the speed tester site is under heavy load, or...
> 
> For example: on the office ADSL2+, the maximum sync speed when I had a 
> service provider technician visit during installation was near 20 Mbps. 
> The provider's own Web pages loaded at roughly 16 Mbps. Stuff from 
> people who peered with that provider, roughly 10 Mbps. From non-peers, 
> anything down to 3 Mbps.
> 
> So what's a reasonable measure for broadband "speed"?
> 
> RC
>