PingER Pros
Low Bandwidth utilization
The PingER MA sends up to 30 x 100Byte pings at 1 second intervals (or 800bits/second) and up to 30 1000Byte pings at 1 second intervals (8000/second) to each target until it receives up to 10 responses from the target or times out in 30 seconds. In the case of the main MA at SLAC that monitors about 800 nodes, each 30 minutes this corresponds to an aggregate data rate of ~7Mbit/sec.
Regularity of measurements
- 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.g. Singapore).
- When calculating annual throughputs, we filter out months with no loss.
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:
Internet service providers typically publish upload and download speeds to describe the size of the connection to the home. The test itself is not a real-world measure; actual user traffic rarely uses the connection this way. Thus it is very rare, if ever, to actually get the published speed when using the network.
Speed tests identify a server, typically not far from the source, and send multiple large samples of data to it and then back from it. The data is significant enough to extend beyond the capacity of the connection in order to measure the time it takes to move all the information. It is similar to trying to see how many cars can move on a highway by sending a lot of cars on it until all lanes are full. Clearly, not something that should be done too often because it saturates your network.
Most applications (other than large multi-threaded file uploads and downloads) do not push the boundaries of this measurement and therefore, while useful, are not the only test of internet performance that is relevant. Most video applications, adjust the rate of transmission of packets to a comfortable speed to give the best user experience. As long as there are no other issues, most modern connections have more than sufficient bandwidth (in spite of the attempt by some internet service providers to convince subscribers otherwise).
The monitor-io service sends a small number of packets, in a planned sequence, to different destinations to measure performance. The packets are analyzed in a detailed fashion to extract the precise cause of poor performance. It is the equivalent of sending one car to see if the road is congested, and documenting the issues seen by the car. By sending packets to different points on the globe, monitor-io has a better sense of the performance across different paths and provides a more real-world view of how any end-user would experience network performance.
The device that runs the monitor-io tests is tuned to perform only this one function and is independent of any interference from other applications, thereby guaranteeing accurate measurements. When the device is connected directly to the first router on the premises, it will give the most accurate view of the performance of the internet service provider.
The service keeps track of all this data so that a user can get a historical view of the quality and reliability of their internet service. It also alerts them if there is impaired or degraded performance at any time of the day. In fact, if they do want to do a standard bandwidth speed test, monitor-io allows them to run one from directly within our site as a sanity check...but we believe that our 24x7 lightweight test sequence will be much more useful.
Other Tools
Monitor-io
See https://www.monitor-io.com/monitor-io-vs-speed-tests.html. Costs money.
SpeedCheck
Ookla
Test your Internet connection bandwidth to locations around the world with this interactive broadband speed test from Ookla.
Think Broadband
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality
The line monitoring system allows you to track the performance of your broadband connection in terms of latency and packet loss. Latency is the time it takes for a piece of information (a 'packet') to get from our servers to your broadband connection, and back. Packet loss is where some bits of information are lost whilst in transit, so it has to be re-sent. These can cause problems with various 'realtime' applications such as online gaming, video conferencing, internet telephony, etc.
Providers of Internet speeds by Country
Speedtest
https://www.speedtest.net/global-index
July 2019
FastMetrics
https://www.fastmetrics.com/internet-connection-speed-by-country.php#top-10-comparison-2018
Top 50 average download speeds June 2017 - May 2018
Wikipedia
2017.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_connection_speeds
Atlas and Boots
https://www.atlasandboots.com/remote-jobs/countries-with-the-fastest-internet-in-the-world/
Countries with fastest Internet in 2018