Speed Tests

[Tywais]

Working at a major university in Thailand I have the luxury of a fairly high speed network. We are linked to the campus backbone through a 1Gb fiber optic link. Last week I was doing torrent downloads of several linux distributions for evaluation/upgrade purposes and was looking at the speed graph (uTorrent) and saw my average download speed was over 10Mbps. There was one peak of several minutes where it hit 45Mbps, which caused me to raise an eyebrow.

Thought I would run a few tests through different speed test facilities and have posted the results below. These are from Chiangmai.

ADSL Thailand speed test

Thaivisa speed test

Speedtest.net San Francisco

And this is speedtest.net list of top providers for Chiangmai based on historical speed tests.

Our university link to Bangkok is via CAT and uni-net. It shows what most already know and that is the International bottleneck.

This is a useful link to check your service provider in your region historical speeds > Speedtest.net regional speeds

[Prasert]

What are the chances that someone else on the campus network downloaded that torrent earlier and is still seeding? In that case you will indeed get very fast speeds - so looking at your peer list during those periods might already explain a lot.

Speedtests will only show you a speed at the moment you test. It doesn't tell you anything more.

Edit:

Two days ago the internet was terribly slow. Since CAT connections were showing the same latency as TOT connections, I already knew the problem was not on the TOT network. The graphs also showed those problems started around 4pm on Sunday and were solved around 11pm. A speedtest wouldn't be able to provide insight into that.

Edited May 20, 2008 by Prasert

[Tywais]

What are the chances that someone else on the campus network downloaded that torrent earlier and is still seeding?

I have already considered that and had figured the 45Mbps peaks were certainly from that. Also, the university session is out so not many students around to clog up the network. Suspect things will slow down considerably once they get back. However, the 10Mbps average is rather consistent over several weeks and suspect several peers to be within Thailand generally and not the uni specifically due to the low number of students here.

Speedtests will only show you a speed at the moment you test. It doesn't tell you anything more.

I'm aware of this, that's why it needs to be done over a period and at different times of the day to get a better picture of the averages. In this case I ran it several times over a period of an hour and you are seeing the peak during that time. These test were not meant to be concise, but just of general interest and reflecting the significant bottleneck at the International level. Except for the Thaivisa (Singapore) link which is fast enough that once I click a topic and blink, it's loaded.

[dingdongrb]

With my 'flux capacitor' tuned to the fullest and since I'm utilizing a Picolight optical parallel transceiver at 120Mb/s I can download porn via fiber at almost light speed.

[Prasert]

I'm aware of this, that's why it needs to be done over a period and at different times of the day to get a better picture of the averages.

Have a look at MRTG. Used worlwide (because it's freeware and simply good) to make graphics of line speeds and lots of other things. It's a small program that checks network usage every 5 minutes and then updates the graph.

This way, you'll be able to see speeds during the day (week, month and year). Fiddle around with scripts and you'll able to graph latency, packet loss and whatever you want.