Testmy Illusion: Satellite

[Jab-Diddle]

On Exede satellite service, I noticed a pattern to this user's results. When this user uses a 10 MB or larger test file, his results are like 6.8 Mbps to 20.08 Mbps. But, when he uses a 1 MB or less test file, his results vary from 54 kbps to 582 Kbps.

Both Hughes and Exede use a proxy to fetch, and I have seen erroueous results from Testmy, and other testing sites.

It would appear Testmy's results may not be the real thing, from time to time.

[CA3LE]

Trust me, that's the speed during that period... if there's a large pause in the transfer then of course it will be a lower result. Over a larger transfer that delay has less and less of an effect on the speed. Plus, sizes over 6MB start for about 1/4 second before the timer to smooth that delay out. You should always trust the result from the larger size over smaller sizes. But the scores off smaller sizes can tell allot about the health of a connection as well.

[Jab-Diddle]

But the scores off smaller sizes can tell allot about the health of a connection as well.

But, any satellite based user will have a minimum of some 600 ms lost to latency, and which can increase during primetime...if satellite user's "proxy server" is located in same city as the test server...if not, latency increases as a function of distance from test server location.

Hence, unless a test site accounts for user's latency (not proxy server's latency), then results will be skewed much more on smaller sized test loads than on larger sized tests.

Hence, if a test site is using bytes/time formula without latency factored in, then inacurrate accounting.