I think it would be a good tool to have in the toolbox, but maybe
selectively applied.
We have one business customer (Broadband), every morning the "IT guy"
will run a speedtest, and call in if it's not the 40mb he expects. He
don't bother to look at any of his other network traffic, any downloads
that are going on, if there are actually any problems. He only cares
what speedtest shows, and if his screen doesn't show 40mb, then he's
calling. Every time, !EVERY TIME!, it's because his network traffic is
using the rest of the connection, which we explain to him EVERY TIME,
but this has been his operating procedure for the last 3 years. "Hey
guys, speeds are slow this morning, you need to check it and fix it."
On 11/5/2019 9:30 AM, Ken Hohhof wrote:
If you sell by speed tiers, I think speedtest.net can actually be your
friend, and you don’t want to doctor the results. If the guy on a 10
Mbps plan is complaining his Internet is slow because he can’t watch 5
HD streams simultaneously, it helps to show him “you’re getting what
you’re paying for”. Then you can maybe upsell him to a higher speed tier.
If he’s downloading a 150 GB Xbox game, your tech support is going to
have to educate him about restricting the hours that game consoles can
do downloads. Making speedtest.net results look better isn’t going to
avoid that, in fact it may make that more difficult. The effort might
be better spent finding a way to deprioritize software downloads, so
people can watch video or pay games while new games are downloading.
If you sell best effort “up to” speeds, the answer may be different.
*From:*AF <af-boun...@af.afmug.com> *On Behalf Of *Adam Moffett
*Sent:* Tuesday, November 5, 2019 8:46 AM
*To:* af@af.afmug.com
*Subject:* Re: [AFMUG] Priority on Speedtest.net
If I'm being honest, it's partly a failure on the sales end to manage
expectations on wireless ("up to 50mbps" etc), and partly a failure of
tech support to manage the conversation. IMO they need to not let the
customer focus on a speed test result and instead prompt them to talk
about what their actual problems are. Whether the speed test says 10
meg or 50 meg has no bearing on the fact that you suck of Call of Duty
or that your VPN to the office doesn't want to connect this morning.
I think the idea is just make the speed test show what they want to
see and then we can move the conversation forward. It strikes me as a
viable but lazy and dishonest solution. I'm trying hard to be open
minded.
I appreciate all the thoughts on this. Thanks everyone.
On 11/5/2019 8:01 AM, Daniel White wrote:
I've worked extensively with Sandvine and Saisei and this is a
topic that always comes up since it is fairly easy to implement
via those appliances (and easier to implement across multiple
speed testing sites).
I don't see it as evil on a best effort connection. Customers
typically are not likely to understand what the results mean and
the only congestion it masks is on your network (which you should
be aware of anyways). You can chalk it up to reasonable network
management practices, as the intent is to show what your
connection is capable of vs. what is available to you at that
moment. Furthermore, unless the speedtest server is on your
network, sometimes the issue is on the net or with the server so
further impacting the results by giving the testing a low
availability on your network is further giving your customers the
wrong impression of your actual delivery.
By implementing something though - how many support tickets are
you potentially reducing? How about customer churn? If these are
issues for you is it because you have actual congestion on your
network? Is hacking the response worthwhile from a technical
effort - and if your customers found out about it is it worthwhile
from a PR standpoint?
I usually end up somewhere in the it's cool to tinker with but of
limited value in the real world. The PR fallout if your
competition finds out and uses it against you is probably more
damaging.
My 2 cents.
photograph
*Daniel White
*Co-Founder & Managing Director of Operations
*phone:* +1 (702) 470-2766
*direct:* +1 (702) 470-2770
Adam Moffett wrote on 11/4/19 12:32:
I can set a higher priority DSCP value on speedtest.net
traffic. I tested this on one SM and it works great. On a
busy AP at 9:30pm I was getting speedtest results from
12-20mbps. I set the speedtest traffic to DSCP 26 and enable
a "medium" priority channel and now it's 34mbps every single
time without fail (and at my data rate, frame size, etc that's
all I could ever hope for).
The question is: Would this be evil?
The feeling is that for some customers there's nothing
actually wrong except they run speedtest.net simultaneously as
their XBox downloads a game and then call to report "slow"
speeds. The feeling is that it would be easier to just let
them see a bigger speed test number than to educate them (and
some will always refuse to be educated).
The evil part is that it would mask an actual congestion problem.
There's also a notion being tossed around the office that our
competitors are already doing this. I have no idea if they
actually are, and I'm also not sure if I care what they're doing.
-Adam
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