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- PingER makes measurements at regular intervals and thus has results by time of day, day of month, month by month, and year by year going back to 1998.
- Also the regularity of measurements can enable measurement of the timing and impact of events such as: earthquakes, tsunamis, social upheavals, mistaken routing, changing from geo-stationary satellite links to terrestrial links etc.
- PingER has a history of Internet performance using a single mechanism for two decades
- PingER has measurements by country, region.
Simplicity of set up
- PingER does not require any software to be installed in the targets.
- PingER uses common targets using the standard Internet path to them, as opposed to selecting only well-connected targets.
PingER Cons
TCP throughput estimation
This uses The macroscopic behavior of the TCP congestion avoidance algorithm by Mathis, Semke, Mahdavi & Ott in Computer Communication Review, 27(3), July 1997, that provides a short and useful formula for the upper bound on the transfer rate: Rate <= (MSS/RTT)*(1 / sqrt{p})
where:
Rate: is the TCP transfer rate or throughput
MSS: is the maximum segment size (fixed for each Internet path, typically 1460 bytes)
RTT: is the round trip time (as measured by TCP)
p: is the packet loss rate.
- This is for a single TCP stream
- Use of multi-stream TCP to achieve high throughput is fairly common today
- Based on TCP Reno implementation.
- Today's standard for Linux is based on CUBIC (see https://www.noction.com/blog/tcp-transmission-control-protocol-congestion-control)
- Fails for no packet loss
- Assuming no loss, in a day PingER will send 480 packets from an MA to a target, or a loss rate of < 0.2%. In a 30 day month it sends 14,400 packet and no loss is a loss rate of < 0.007% and in a year 172,800 packets or loss < 0.00058%.
- No loss in a month is commonly observed for targets with excellent network connectivity (e.
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- g. Singapore).
- When calculating annual throughputs, we filter out months with no loss.
- g. Singapore).
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does PingER differ from speed tests
This is similar to monitor-io (see https://www.monitor-io.com/monitor-io-vs-speed-tests.html), where it says:
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