HHHhhmmm Anyone else seen any results like this ? NOT calling you a "marketing-guru" V3G
Just trying to see what is happening in the real world
KZNChris
As I've posted before, you need to understand the network architecture and then overlay your test results on that and you'll get a better picture of what is happening.
Think of the Vodacom network as a distributed star model (which it is). Draw a picture with a star in the middle, a star on each branch and again a start on each branch. And yet again. Do this for 4 'layers' and you have a feel for the architecture. As a end user you sit on the end of one of the final branches. Think of the point where you enter the internet as the center of the middle star. The final end-points (indicating you as an end user) counts in the millions. The second layer, many thousands.
Firstly, you can see just how big this network is with thousands upon thousands of interconnecting links, all supplied by Telkom today (Not quite all, but >99%).
You can also see that as you go deeper into the core network, you more and more share links (i.e. bandwidth) with other users and most importantly, any congestion along that path will affect you, even if the congestion is not near you.
To test the speed of the Vodacom portion of the network we put speed.vodacom.co.za at the heart of the central star. The speed test is the same test system as used by other testing sites such as speedtest.net, just with a custom GUI.
So the results you get from speed.vodacom.co.za are very real (we have no way of faking them in any case) but was specifically put down so we can get a feel for the portion of the network under our control. It won't measure what you experience as you leave the Vodacom-only portion of the network.
In the distributed star model above, the second last layer represents the end points of any Telkom lines and it's here we are awaiting thousand upon thousands of lines to be delivered. Sometimes we get them quickly, mainly because Telkom had capacity available, such as the place on the N4 I posted above. Obviously there was capacity and when we placed the country-wide order for "3.6 back-haul" Telkom could deliver immediately.
But in areas where there is a much higher density, many people are asking for capacity including Vodacom and MTN. And it's here where the delays in getting bandwidth is felt the most. So you'll get 2.5Mb/s in Gat-Sonder-Water but might struggle to get 700Kb/s in Sandton. It's a pain we all would not like to feel.
Once you've tested to speed.vodacom.co.za, you know the effective throughput you get to the point before you break out on the internet. But you use very few if any servers on the Vodacom network so the info is often of (great) academic value.
To test what your experience is on the net itself you must now run other speed tests, such as the ones provided by speedtest.net. But it's not so simple, they are themselves subject to bottlenecks as seen by the Cape Town speedtest.net server in the last week or two.
But they do give an indication and if you use their results together with other test results you'll built up a picture of what happening.
At the end of the day, getting a view on your real-time usage is still the best and I use DU Meter for this. So when I download anything, I watch DU Meter and that gives me my 'real-world' experience. But it cannot tell you where any bottlenecks might be. These can be ANYWHERE between you and the remote server. The speed tests will help you narrow down where you might be seeing them.
As soon as our POP in New York comes on-line, I'll ask to a have a second Vodacom speed test installed there. This will give us great info on your experience from your PC right to where you break out in the US. Will probably do London as well.
So, keep on posting speed.vodacom.co.za results (together with other servers) as it helps us build a picture of the network.
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