said by tschmidt:I ran the test twice; the first time jitter and latency were the same, which is impossible. Transfer speed measurement seemed reasonable accurate.
Overall I think having FCC do its own research is laudable but there are several serious caveats:
1) This is by no means a scientifically credible poll of US broadband.
2) We, like many others, have home network. To be an accurate determination of ISP performance no other computer should be using the Internet for the duration of the test. I did not see any mention of that on the test page.
3) Likewise applications on the test PC should not access the Internet for the duration of the test.
4) Performance testing is end-to-end. Issues outside the control of the ISP can degrade performance.
5) As already mentioned, temporary speed increases, will artificially inflate test performance.
/Tom
All true. There are several more issues. That said, these are data points in a set of gathered data. Once analyzed, some test results will be statistical outliers. In the end, analysts should be able to refine and clarify the picture by filtering out much of the noise.