Samknows releases Broadband Performance Monitoring Report
Samknows.com has published its first ‘Performance Monitoring Report’ on the UK broadband providers recently. The report which contains more than 40 pages is available in Adobe .PDF format and can be downloaded from its website. Earlier, Samknows has installed a unit on the home/office broadband connections in the UK that enabled it to monitor the performance of ISPs and get the essential data such as broadband speed, usage, throughput, connection failures etc.
Presently, the findings are based on 223 monitoring units, Samknows says, and the monitoring process will be expanded in the future. While the performance of the most broadband providers in the UK has been monitored (using 20 units on average), a few ISPs like AOL broadband provider is yet to be included in the test, according to the report. The performance of a few broadband providers like BT, Be and Virgin Media has been tested by more than 20 monitoring units.
Here are some of the findings based on the test conducted during six week period from 223 monitoring units:
There was little discernable difference between most ISPs in majority of metrics.
The ISPA award winner, Zen Internet offered the fewest failures across all metrics.
Among the ISPs, Virgin Media’s cable services and Be/O2’s services provided a consistently low latency throughout (means better speed). Virgin ADSL broadband services performed poorly in this area. Latency levels: Virgin Media (cable) – 29.03ms, Be Unlimited – 30.50ms, Plus Net – 37.68ms, BT – 37.84ms, TalkTalk – 43.99ms, Virgin.net (ADSL) – 62.56ms
BT broadband provider provided the fastest throughput when measured as a percentage of implied line speed.
The cable broadband provider, Virgin Media’s cable throughput remained consistent on their 2, 4 and 10Mbps products, however, was quite variable on their 20Mbps product (Virgin Media XL broadband).
Interestingly, the use of traffic shaping in the networks of BT and PlusNet, resulted in certain classes of traffic slowing significantly during peak hours.
The ADSL 2+ broadband provider, Be Unlimited which has a fairly robust DNS service has performed well in most areas like DNS performance, less number of pocket loss, VoIP performance, web page fetching times etc.
