Android data throughput graph experiment

[Sean]

As Android does not show data traffic in realtime like Windows does, I recently bought an App that does.  The main purpose here is to check how my cellular based ISP (Three Ireland) shapes traffic as some sites such as Cloudflare traffic are clearly prioritised.

 

Have a look at these two traffic graphs and let me know what you think the average download speed is for the blue line of the first and second graph:

 

 

Ignore the grey line, which is upload traffic.  The throughput variation is related to my ISP as 4G is a shared medium, but I'll will explain why I picked these two later. ?

 

[Sean]

As my Internet connection throughput intermittently dips due to running on a cellular 4G network,  I was curious to see how well the Internet Speed Meter app handles fluctuating traffic.  From running linear and multithreaded tests with TestMy, it corresponds reasonably well with TestMy on download tests. 

 

Things got a little interesting when I ran Ookla's Speed test where my connection throughput fluctuated during the test. Here are the two full-screen screenshots.  In the above graphs, I drew in horizontal lines for each 0.5MB/s.  In the graphs below, I drew the green line based on the download test result divided by 8 for MB/s, calculated to the nearest pixel:

 

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The reason I picked these two graphs is that the traffic graphs were very similar, apart from a deeper dip during Ookla's speed test. That didn't stop it producing a faster result!

 

These graphs clearly show the two different methodologies these speed tests take.  To my eyes with the left graph, the area of the spikes above the green line will roughly fill the valleys below it.  So I have no doubt I was averaging about 22Mbps at the time.

 

As for the right graph, there's no way I was averaging 23Mbps during that test.  This is a clear example of Speedtest's methodology "The fastest 10% and slowest 30% of your results are DISCARDED".  During this test, I saw the speedometer hit 26Mbps briefly before dipping to the low teens for a few seconds, then gradually climbed until it hit the 23 figure just be fore the download stage ended.

[CA3LE]

Great representation!