Speedtests Advance Past the Stone Age

4 Mins read

Veego introduces a proactive, context-aware speedtest that fixes problems, too

“My internet connection is slow!”  That’s one of the most prevalent complaints received by ISP Customer Care Centers. There are numerous websites that enable users to quickly quantify their speed and throughput rates. In fact, millions of people run speedtests every day. 

Ookla, one of the most widely used services for measuring internet speed, has, to date, conducted more than 28 billion speedtests on demand by internet users. ISPs often make Ookla or some other speedtest service available to their subscribers on their websites.

When that complaint of slow internet comes into the Customer Care Center, naturally, the first thing for the CSR to do is to verify the actual speed. So, the CSR quickly performs a classic speedtest that reveals how fast a ping can travel from your home to a remote site and back. It also shows how fast your current upload and download rates are. 

But here is what a classic speedtest won’t tell you:

  • If you are enduring latency issues that affect your gaming but not your download speed or streaming experience
  • The cause of the speed problem—it might be somewhere along the internet as a whole, but not between your home router and the ISP
  • If there is a delivery problem with your current cloud server (you are watching a movie delivered to you by a Netflix server that is slow right now)
  • Why you are experiencing slowness but others in your household aren’t
  • How to resolve your problem yourself without calling customer service for help

The Trouble with Speedtests

The classic speedtest has been around for a long time. It answers some of yesterday’s questions but is inadequate for today’s needs. Here are some problems with the classic speedtest:

  • You have to start a speedtest manually. If millions of people ran speedtests at the same time, they would flood the internet and probably bring it to a standstill. So, speedtests cannot be active all the time. You run it once, it takes a few seconds, and it delivers its results to your screen. If you want to know if anything changed recently, you have to run it again. 
  • If you are having intermittent problems, what are the chances that you will run a speedtest at the perfect moment that the problem is occurring? Not likely. 
  • A speedtest cannot be used to detect problems proactively. It isn’t triggered upon some throughput condition. It’s manual.
  • Speedtests don’t reveal the “why” behind any throughput or speed problem. They just tell you where you stand, not why you are standing there.  
  • Even when you aren’t having a problem, you can’t rely on a speedtest to tell you about the Quality of Service (QoS) that you, individually, are enjoying (or suffering). Let’s say you run a speedtest and now know your actual internet rates at the moment—the round-trip time seems reasonable, the upload and download speeds are close to the max. But those figures are overall household measures. They don’t tell you about the actual QoS of any individual session. For example, is sister’s 4K Netflix movie experience causing intermittent lag to brother’s League of Legends conquests? 
  • A speedtest doesn’t proactively figure out the best usage of the internet in your home. It can’t let you know if there is ample bandwidth at this moment to stream 4K, to conduct a flawless Zoom session, or to play a low latency-demanding game without lag. It can’t tell you to cut your YouTube viewing down from HD to free up bandwidth for your daughter’s online chemistry experiment. 

Always On and Granular

The Veego speedtest is designed for the needs of 2020 and beyond. Unlike its classic counterpart, a Veego speedtest is always active, yet it doesn’t hog internet bandwidth. In fact, the Veego speedtest is proactive. It can tell you a lot more than the mere ping roundtrip time or the current upload/download speed.

A Veego Agent in the home router is always watching the devices and current services throughout the home. It’s granular, too. Automatically, the Veego Agent notices when any service (Fortnite gaming, Netflix movie streaming, Spotify music service, WizIQ remote learning, etc.) that uses the router is suffering from inadequate throughput or latency. In its speedtest, Veego doesn’t just use a “one number fits all” approach. The Veego Agent considers the type of service and the capability of the device on which that service is running. It automatically compares the current throughput rates to an acceptable threshold and maximum rate and determines if it can do more to improve the quality of experience (QoE) of any user. Then, it proactively maximizes the QoE of each user given all the conditions of the home at that time. 

Establishing Priorities

The Veego Agent enables and maintains internet prioritization within the home. Especially in these trying “stay at home’ Coronavirus days, there’s a lot of competition for bandwidth among family members. But, a priori, the family can determine that Dad’s football match is not as important as Mom’s work-related video conference or Junior’s distance learning. So, if all three are running simultaneously and choking the total bandwidth, Veego proactively notices the condition and automatically re-structures the services according to pre-determined priorities.

ISPs Love Veego Speedtests

The proactive nature of Veego with its ability to monitor and adjust bandwidth, latency, and throughput per session and on-the-fly means fewer bandwidth problems in the home. For ISPs, that means satisfied subscribers and a welcome reduction in calls to the Customer Care Center.

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