5 ms·

A full Nutrition Facts label would be nice. Downstream AND Upstream, latency numbers to headend and nearest IXP, availability numbers, then price stability betw

by teeray 3y ago

A full Nutrition Facts label would be nice. Downstream AND Upstream, latency numbers to headend and nearest IXP, availability numbers, then price stability between day 0 and 3-5 years.

dtaht 3y ago
The biggest thing that makes me nuts about our speedtest regimes is that we test upload and download separately, rather than at the same time. People have 16+ wifi devices on their networks today. There IS upstream traffic going on at the same time, most of the time, and what happens when one side or the other also saturated or merely in use is widely misunderstood. For example a short packet fifo on the uplink starves the downlink, which you can see from Oleg´s recent starlink rrul tests here: https://olegkutkov.me/2024/02/12/starlink-terminal-revision-4-overview-and-tests/ https://olegkutkov.me/2024/02/12/starlink-terminal-revision-... If more of our tests tested up + down + latency - and ISPs and users deployed bufferbloat fixes like fq_codel, cake, and libreqos.io - the internet would be a lot less jittery and feel a lot more fast, all the time. https://blog.cerowrt.org/post/speedtests/ https://blog.cerowrt.org/post/speedtests/ has some ranting. More ranting about saner uses for fiber here, also: https://blog.cerowrt.org/post/towards_better_broadband/ https://blog.cerowrt.org/post/towards_better_broadband/ So the nutrition label scheme is seriously flawed without testing up+down.
wmf 3y ago
https://www.fcc.gov/broadbandlabels https://www.fcc.gov/broadbandlabels
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  Those labels go into effect this year, when the "majority of providers must display at the point of sale clear, easy-to-understand, and accurate information about the cost and performance of broadband services by April 10, 2024; providers with 100,000 or fewer subscriber lines must do so by October 10, 2024. Those points of sale include online and in-store."
rmbyrro 3y ago
There should be a measure of consistency as well. Like p90, p95, p99. It's a different measure, but something similar to how we measure system availability in SWE.
- prirun 3y ago
  I had a flaky internet connection for a while, where it would have a few seconds of dropout maybe every hour. It was annoying as hell, especially for remote ssh connections. It turned out to be a bad cable from my house to the Spectrum box, which they did fix after 3 visits. Doing the math, this is 75/(24*3600) = .00086, or availability of 99.914%, which sounds great, but in reality it's garbage. Instead of p99, which wouldn't tell us anything really, I'd suggest something like average and total packet loss on a continuous 1-second ping by month for the last year, or even by day for non-zero days. Then if a service has dropout problems it will be easy to spot.
  - dtaht 3y ago
    I am a big believer in passive monitoring (see libreqos). Measuring packet loss is a PITA because it is the absence of information. While you can infer it from protocols like TCP, QUIC and VOIP protocols make loss only visible to the end-points. A request response protocol like ping is a lousy metric for measuring voice quality. See irtt. Sending a VOIP-like flow in both directions, one small packet every 20ms, would be vastly better than ping, except there is an energy cost to it.
- everforward 3y ago
  I hope you'll forgive the nitpick, but those percentiles aren't a measure of consistency, they're a measure of the impact of outliers on the high end. E.g. [30,30,30,30,30,30,30,30,60,60] (8 30's and 2 60's) has the same p90/95/99 as [20,20,20,20,40,40,40,40,60,60] (4 20's, 4 40's, and 2 60's), but they're not equally consistent. They're probably fine here, because I don't think we actually care about consistency (I wouldn't complain if suddenly half my packets had lower latency) we care about the worst case latency and how often it happens. Standard deviation is what I'd use if I was measuring consistency.
hobs 3y ago
Competition would be nice, getting a label doesn't do shit if you have no choice to change brands.
- teeray 3y ago
  It does form a basis for competition though. If you have a competitor, at least the incumbent can’t turn around and say they’re offering some nonsense “10G PowerBlast Deluxe Service” in response, hoping to bamboozle the laypeople. It gets us closer to a world where Internet service marketing is as exciting as my electric bill.
  - hobs 3y ago
    Absolutely, and sometimes labeling does push or pressure corporations, but I just see that the main problem is not labeling the poison we're eating, its making it illegal in the first place.
- AnarchismIsCool 3y ago
  Maybe some legislation to prevent them from trying to kill community ISP projects...

by teeray 3y ago

A full Nutrition Facts label would be nice. Downstream AND Upstream, latency numbers to headend and nearest IXP, availability numbers, then price stability between day 0 and 3-5 years.

dtaht 3y ago

The biggest thing that makes me nuts about our speedtest regimes is that we test upload and download separately, rather than at the same time. People have 16+ wifi devices on their networks today. There IS upstream traffic going on at the same time, most of the time, and what happens when one side or the other also saturated or merely in use is widely misunderstood. For example a short packet fifo on the uplink starves the downlink, which you can see from Oleg´s recent starlink rrul tests here: https://olegkutkov.me/2024/02/12/starlink-terminal-revision-4-overview-and-tests/ https://olegkutkov.me/2024/02/12/starlink-terminal-revision-... If more of our tests tested up + down + latency - and ISPs and users deployed bufferbloat fixes like fq_codel, cake, and libreqos.io - the internet would be a lot less jittery and feel a lot more fast, all the time. https://blog.cerowrt.org/post/speedtests/ https://blog.cerowrt.org/post/speedtests/ has some ranting. More ranting about saner uses for fiber here, also: https://blog.cerowrt.org/post/towards_better_broadband/ https://blog.cerowrt.org/post/towards_better_broadband/ So the nutrition label scheme is seriously flawed without testing up+down.

wmf 3y ago

https://www.fcc.gov/broadbandlabels https://www.fcc.gov/broadbandlabels

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
Those labels go into effect this year, when the "majority of providers must display at the point of sale clear, easy-to-understand, and accurate information about the cost and performance of broadband services by April 10, 2024; providers with 100,000 or fewer subscriber lines must do so by October 10, 2024. Those points of sale include online and in-store."

rmbyrro 3y ago

There should be a measure of consistency as well. Like p90, p95, p99. It's a different measure, but something similar to how we measure system availability in SWE.

prirun 3y ago
I had a flaky internet connection for a while, where it would have a few seconds of dropout maybe every hour. It was annoying as hell, especially for remote ssh connections. It turned out to be a bad cable from my house to the Spectrum box, which they did fix after 3 visits. Doing the math, this is 75/(24*3600) = .00086, or availability of 99.914%, which sounds great, but in reality it's garbage. Instead of p99, which wouldn't tell us anything really, I'd suggest something like average and total packet loss on a continuous 1-second ping by month for the last year, or even by day for non-zero days. Then if a service has dropout problems it will be easy to spot.
- dtaht 3y ago
  I am a big believer in passive monitoring (see libreqos). Measuring packet loss is a PITA because it is the absence of information. While you can infer it from protocols like TCP, QUIC and VOIP protocols make loss only visible to the end-points. A request response protocol like ping is a lousy metric for measuring voice quality. See irtt. Sending a VOIP-like flow in both directions, one small packet every 20ms, would be vastly better than ping, except there is an energy cost to it.
everforward 3y ago
I hope you'll forgive the nitpick, but those percentiles aren't a measure of consistency, they're a measure of the impact of outliers on the high end. E.g. [30,30,30,30,30,30,30,30,60,60] (8 30's and 2 60's) has the same p90/95/99 as [20,20,20,20,40,40,40,40,60,60] (4 20's, 4 40's, and 2 60's), but they're not equally consistent. They're probably fine here, because I don't think we actually care about consistency (I wouldn't complain if suddenly half my packets had lower latency) we care about the worst case latency and how often it happens. Standard deviation is what I'd use if I was measuring consistency.

hobs 3y ago

Competition would be nice, getting a label doesn't do shit if you have no choice to change brands.

teeray 3y ago
It does form a basis for competition though. If you have a competitor, at least the incumbent can’t turn around and say they’re offering some nonsense “10G PowerBlast Deluxe Service” in response, hoping to bamboozle the laypeople. It gets us closer to a world where Internet service marketing is as exciting as my electric bill.
- hobs 3y ago
  Absolutely, and sometimes labeling does push or pressure corporations, but I just see that the main problem is not labeling the poison we're eating, its making it illegal in the first place.
AnarchismIsCool 3y ago
Maybe some legislation to prevent them from trying to kill community ISP projects...