[1st-mile-nm] Fwd: Measuring Mobile Broadband Speeds

[Richard Lowenberg]

Of interest to 1st-Mile subscribers, and the State of NM,
as the NM Broadband Mapping initiative provides Speed Test links.

Thanks for your insightful and informative postings, Doug.
RL

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [New post] Measuring Mobile Broadband Speeds
Date: 2017-09-25 06:24
 From: POTs and PANs <comment-reply at wordpress.com>
To: rl at 1st-mile.org


CCGConsulting posted: "I was using Google search on my cellphone a few
days ago and I thought my connect time was sluggish. That prompted me to
take a look at the download speeds on cellular networks, something I
haven’t checked in a while. There are two different companies "

MEASURING MOBILE BROADBAND SPEEDS

by CCGConsulting

I was using Google search on my cellphone a few days ago and I
thought my connect time was sluggish. That prompted me to take a look at
the download speeds on cellular networks, something I haven’t checked
in a while.

There are two different companies that track and report on mobile data
speeds, and the two companies report significantly different results.
First is Ookla, which offers a speed test for all kinds of web
connections. Their latest US speed test results represent cellphone
users who took their speed test in the first half of this year. Ookla
reports that US cellular download speeds have increased 19% over the
last year and are now at an average of 22.69 Mbps. They report that the
average upload speeds are 8.51 Mbps, an improvement of 4% over the last
year. Ookla also found that rural mobile broadband speeds are 20.9%
slower at urban speeds and are at an average of 17.93 Mbps.

The other company tracking mobile broadband speeds reports a different
result. Akamai reports that the average cellular download speed for the
whole US was 10.7 Mbps for the first quarter of 2017, less than half of
the result shown by Ookla.

This is the kind of difference that can have you scratching your head.
But the difference is significant since cellular companies widely brag
about the higher Ookla numbers, and these are the numbers that end up
being shown to regulators and policy makers.

So what are the differences between the two numbers? The Ookla numbers
are the results of cellphone users who voluntarily take their speed
test. The latest published numbers represent tests from 3 million
cellular devices (smartphones and tablets) worldwide. The Akamai results
are calculated in a totally different way. Akamai has monitoring
equipment at a big percentage of the world’s internet POPs and they
measure the actual achieved speeds of all web traffic that comes through
these POPs. They measure the broadband being used on all of the actual
connections they can see (which in the US is most of them).

So why would these results be so different and what are the actual
mobile broadband speeds in the US? The Ookla results are from speed
tests, which last less than a minute. So Ookla speed test measures the
_potential_ speed that a user could theoretically achieve on the web.
It’s a test of the full bandwidth capability of the connection. But
this is not necessarily the actual results for cellphone users for a few
reasons:

  	* Cellphone providers and many other ISPs often provide a burst of
speeds for the first minute or two of a broadband connection. Since the
vast majority of web events are short-term events this provides users
with greater speeds than would be achieved if they measured the speed
over a longer time interval. Even with a speed test you often can notice
the speed tailing off by the end of the test – this is the ‘burst’
slowing down.
  	* Many web experts have suspected that the big ISPs provide priority
routing for somebody taking a speed test. This would not be hard to do
since there are only a few commonly used speed test sites. If priority
routing is real, then speed test results are cooked to be higher than
would be achieved when connecting to other web sites.

The Akamai numbers also can’t be used without some interpretation.
They are measuring achieved speeds, which means the actual connection
speeds for mobile web connections. If somebody is watching a video on
their cellphone, then Akamai would be measuring the speed of that
connection, which is not the same as measuring the full potential speed
for that same cellphone.

The two companies are measuring something totally different and the
results are not comparable. But the good news is that both companies
have been tracking the same things for years and so they both can see
the changes in broadband speeds. They also both measure speeds around
the world and are able to compare US speeds with others. But even that
makes for an interesting comparison. Ookla says that US mobile speed
test results are 44th in a world ranking. That implies that the mobile
networks in other countries make faster connections. Akamai didn’t
rank the countries, but the US is pretty far down the list. A lot of
countries in Europe and Asia have faster actual connection speeds than
the US, and even a few countries in Africa like Kenya and Egypt are
faster than here. My conclusion from all of this is that ‘actual’
speeds are somewhere between the two numbers. But I doubt we’ll ever
know. The Akamai numbers, though, represent what all cell users in
aggregate are actually using, and perhaps that’s the best number.

But back to my own cellphone, which is what prompted me to investigate
this. Using the Ookla speed test I showed a 13 Mbps download and 5 Mbps
upload speed. There was also a troublesome 147 ms of latency, which is
probably what is accounting for my slow web experience. But I also
learned how subjective these speeds are. I walked around the
neighborhood and got different results as I changed distances from cell
towers. This was a reminder that cellular data speeds are locally
specific and that the distance you are from a cell site is perhaps the
most important factor in determining your speed. And that means that
it’s impossible to have a meaningful talk about mobile data speeds
since they vary widely within the serving area of every cell site in the
world.


Links:
------
[1] http://potsandpansbyccg.com/author/ccgcomm/
[2] 
http://potsandpansbyccg.com/2017/09/25/measuring-mobile-broadband-speeds/


---------------------------------------------------------------
Richard Lowenberg, Executive Director
1st-Mile Institute     505-603-5200
Box 8001, Santa Fe, NM 87504,
rl at 1st-mile.org     www.1st-mile.org
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