response to the email from Mike O'Connor that I forwarded to him.
This is a bit technical and I'm not claiming that I understand all the
details but it may be helpful for those of you involved in broadband
issues.
>>
>> another cool thing from the engineers would be suggestions on how to
>> do the test better. even cooler would be a site where people could
>> go and *do* a test so they could compare their results with the ones
>> that are coming back in the map. even cooler yet would be a way to
>> track and publish those results.
Thats the thing, doing a test that an end-user can just click on isn't
that easy of a problem to solve. Thus the big discrepancy in bandwidth
results from various tests, and different connection types.
There's easy to use tools from the CLI when you have two machines on
each side of where you want to test, but the likelyhood of that is
pretty nil for the end-users that are interested in testing it.
(ie. maybe 1-2% of the end users?)
There are several CLI programs like iperf, FTP, TTCP, etc.
Ie. run up iperf server on one end, iperf client on the other machine.
You'd see some pretty decent results.
$ iperf -s