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

[Richard Chirgwin]

Ignoring the obvious howler that most users here, and I conjecture most 
users in most places, are running the test from corporate connections 
(hint: most Australian users are on sub-megabit plans, yet the average 
is multi-megabit), we don't do so bad.

Australia is in the top quartile for both median and average speeds, and 
if I confine the calculation to countries with average speeds greater 
than a megabit per second, we're still in the top quartile for both 
average and median.

But this particular survey is completely without context: we don't know 
the notional plan speed (or for that matter the last-mile synch speed) 
of the user connection.

RC

sylvano wrote:
> Further to the discussion on broadband speeds, I came across the following at 
> zdnet, which (at the time I visted) had Australia at 20th in the world for 
> speed. 
>
> There are some *very obvious* issues in that there are many countries outdoing 
> Australia (and many not) for their ranking based upon attempt counts of less 
> than 100 (compared to Australia that is 190,000+), it doesn't distinguish 
> residential from commercial, it doesn't provide a provider comparison and it 
> aint a random sample per se.  
>
> But I do appreciate the fact that zdnet quotes a fastest, slowest, median and 
> average speed.  i.e. a semblance of distributional reality, or, a general 
> picture of the range of experience, which is mildly satisfying.  For it is 
> this aspect of measuring speed that is the key point of interest, I think, in 
> the context of claims by providers: what is the general speed experienced by 
> users. No one can deny there will be variations depending on sun spot 
> activity, and whether one has decided to splice the 150 metres of extension 
> cable from the wall jack to the modem.
>
> And yes, I added my own time/traffic/hardware dependent input to the survey: a 
> humble 4,185Kb/s recorded for my home connection, which places me below the 
> median and the average for Australia from the self selected sample 
> contributing to zdnet. (... I think back to patience of downloading  
> satellite images over a 9600 modem on a 486pc, via gopher ...)
>
>  Broadband Speed Test results by country
>  http://www.zdnet.com.au/broadband/results.htm
>
> Sylvano
>
>