Broadband Test

For a consumer to figure out whether he's getting the Broad Band quality he's paying for.

Relevance for our household

  • we use UVerse
  • everyone is on WiFi, no wired ethernet
  • the hub is in the basement
  • so Number One Son working on the 2nd floor often complains about jittering on YouTube videos he has to watch for schoolwork. (Running MsWindows on AsUs.) (He has same issues on his MacBook Air, though we haven't tested that thoroughly.)
  • sometimes Number Two Son complains about latency in a game he's playing (on ground floor) (iMac)
  • WiFi distance could be an issue
  • Could it matter if the DVR is recording multiple channels at that time? (Tried that during the day and had no problem.)
  • Could time-of-day matter as it drives use by neighbors?

Two metrics:

  • bandwidth (up and down)
  • latency (pings)

Test sites like http://www.speedtest.net/ (UVerse http://www.att.com/speedtest/) and https://speedcheck.org/ supposedly help. But

  • I've read in the past that ISPs catch when you're hitting those sites, and give your house more bandwidth temporarily.
  • Sept'2015 I got invitation to use SamKnows box, but this says the ISPs just always give priority to traffic to the known test sites.
  • TomRichards accumulated data to show UVerse not giving him his 20Mbps. And that code just runs against speedtest.net (Note comments in the readme page). But he validates his process by getting good results from his office network.
  • Others say the tests focus on short/bursty traffic and the ISP-s prioritize that kind of traffic.
    • Another commenter on that thread recommends http://speedof.me It constantly increases the file size and cannot be tricked by Power Boost or similar bandwidth enhancement services used by ISPs.
  • I'm never sure how much of this is just Conspiracy Theory
  • Possible solutions
    • Google could offer test via YouTube, since that's one of the bigger uses of traffic. They provide an overall rating of your ISP for your location, but it doesn't look like they have a real-time test you can run yourself. They also have a pretty useless checklist of things you can do to troubleshoot issues.
    • NetFlix is bigger. Hey, they do this!
    • Something that uses BitTorrent protocol to spread across lots of servers?

Other notes on video stuttering/buffering

  • For about a year with Time Warner, YouTube was the ONLY bad site. Constant and endless buffering. Until I set my preferred video to 720p. And then it ran much faster than the 240p, 360p or 1080p. Then someone told me this could be fixed by switching to Google's DNS and sure enough it went away immediately.
  • YouTube has a support forum with many threads about stuttering and buffering.
  • It seems like I see more complaints about Google Chrome, esp on MsWindows, with recommendation to turn off Hardware Acceleration in Chrome prefs.
  • MsWindows-10 seems to be having some issues (Aug'2015).

Edited:    |       |    Search Twitter for discussion