How Is The Scam Pulled Off?

[KhunDave]

In a nutshell - I'm having the usual issues with 3BB, and I've got the engineer coming round soon. What I would like to do before he arrives is to understand exactly how Thai ISPs "hi-jack" some of the results on Speedtest.net

This has been raised before on this forum: when a speedtest is run to a major foreign city the result somehow comes out as an inside-Thailand value. Try a minor location in the same foreign country and the real result is shown - e.g. if I run a test to San Francisco I get 39ms latency and 8mb down (oddly this is the same result I get if I run a test to Bangkok...), however if I run a test to nearby Palo Alto I get 278ms and 0.45mb. The same pattern can be repeated in tests to many countries around the world.

When I was moaning down the telephone to 3BB I mentioned that I was only getting around 0.5mb to anywhere outside Thailand, and the immediate response was "ok run a test now to London" and of course London is one of the "hi-jacked" locations. Thus it appears that they are well aware of the scam and are quick to use it to try and demonstrate that your connection is good when really it isn't.

I'd really like to confront the engineer with the evidence when he inevitably tries the same tactic. Does anyone know the details of how they do it?

[negreanu]

it's not hijacked just frequent test servers will be on their "invisible" caching (Proxy) server at the ISP. Saves them international bandwidth and gives performance increase for the users (Apparent).

[little_muppet]

its not a scam it is just the way it is..... nothing we can do about it. try not to test ur speed too often to avoid the disappointment..(that is wat i try to do lol ) i can feel ur anger...

[Daffy D]

A good way to show an engineer what your speeds are like is to have your Client (uTorrent) running with the lower window showing the speeds of all downloads/uploads.

Set the display to 1 second and be sure to have some downloads with good seeds going, this will show your actual speeds and react almost immediately to any change in settings that the engineer may try.

[joncl]

Also look where their international pipes terminates in each country and if you select that termination point the speed will be huge (i.e. London), but if you select another site to test near the termination point it will always be very much slower.

[sulasno]

the best test is to download a file and note the time taken; I download a file about 32Mb every hour and it takes about a minute on 6Mb 3BB speedtests are only an indication

[urandom]

what you could do:

install any downloader that lets you make DLs from a list (like wget or aria2) and use the attached list. it's a list of the exact same file that is mirrored in many different countries. you should edit this list and remove some of them otherwise it will take ages to complete. i started to do it but it quickly became a PITA so i'll let you finish

then you can show the technician that whatever the country, the speed sucks. it has to be noted that many mirrors are ISP mirrors or university mirrors with huuuuge bandwith available so he can't blame the servers.

just FYI: this mirrored file may not exist anymore from one day to another (well it should last a few weeks a least from now), if you get this problem, just pick another one in the same directory.

for some reason, it didnt get attached. here it is:

http://ompldr.org/vNmt6ZQ/3bbsuxballz.txt

Edited December 16, 2010 by urandom

[bangkokcitylimits]

Speedtest.net and most others who offer 'their' internet testsite purchase the software from a company called Ookla and simply implement it in their own site, here Ookla's documentation page: http://wiki.ookla.com/

[thaitar]

Are there any ISPs that have good speeds to North America? Is True better than 3BB?

[nikster]

Are there any ISPs that have good speeds to North America? Is True better than 3BB?

That changes randomly every few months. I believe right now True is better than 3BB but just saying that because I have 3BB and it sucks.

[MikeCNX]

http://myspeed.visua...e.com/index.php

The only reliable one IMHO.

Watch your results and shiver! especially the abominable QoS.

edit: I just ran another test to San Jose, CA, USA (major hub for international cables) and again crying my eyes out. Results below

Detail for Test #40743

Summary

This report refers to a connection test carried out by IP address 180.183.0.** on 22 Dec 2010 7:05:22 GMT+00:00.

Download speed 500 Kbps

Upload speed 665 Kbps

D/load COS 44 %

U/load COS 81 %

RTT 258 ms

RTT Consistency 84 %

Max Delay 614 ms

Avg Delay 122 ms

Max Bandwidth 10400 Kbps

Route Speed 2032 Kbps

Forced Idle 83 %

Route Conc 20.7

Download test s

Upload test s

TestBandwidth Speed

Edited December 22, 2010 by MikeCNX