Many of us use Skype or other VOIP solutions to communicate. In the case of Skype, I often find myself speaking to someone and having the connection quality go from Black (High) to Yellow (Medium) to Red (Fail). Unless the other party is experiencing a known Internet outage or other problem, there is no way to know why the call had a problem.
It would be great to be able to do a speed test between two TestMy.net endpoints. This testing could combine load testing with traceroute testing to help identify where a point-to-point communication problem might exist.
The goal of this type of testing, would be to provide end users with actual/actionable information on where there data may be throttled and by whom, potentially incorporating elements of the Glasnost project. Simulating certain types of traffic (VOIP, FTP, etc.) could reveal what types of data might be the victim of selective throttling (traffic shaping) or delays that could indicate man-in-the-middle-induced delays.
John Westra @@John_Westra
Thanks for the additional tool suggestions! How about giving two users to simultaneously collaborate and run a comprehensive suite of tests to common end points and share the results in real-time? Also, getting test results based on image downloads is helpful, but it doesn't address the issue of ISPs throttling particular packet types such as VOIP.