[WXC/VFX] WxC: some interesting information

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freitasm

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#117020 16-Mar-2008 22:45

ninjabear: Those are my assumptions.You can believe what you want.

So you think "assumptions" have more value than someone reporting a fact?

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Niel

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#117025 16-Mar-2008 23:01

Suppose 1 speed test is 1MB, then 1TB comes from about 1 million speed tests. That is an average of a number of speed tests per XNet customer every month. There are some people that would do a lot, but most people do not even know what a speed test is. So I can believe that 1TB of speed testing per month for a small ISP is a lot.

Good feedback in the original post, but the interesting info I'm looking for is how many broadband customers they have now and also how many they had 5 months ago before the announcements of Fusion.

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#117033 16-Mar-2008 23:19

I know some numbers, but cannot disclose. But I can tell you that WxC expect to have [x] new users on Fusion by the end of February but wound up with [x * 4]...

The most incredible part? All word of mouth. WxC is not advertising anywhere, yet.

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#117035 16-Mar-2008 23:24

freitasm: I know some numbers, but cannot disclose. But I can tell you that WxC expect to have [x] new users on Fusion by the end of February but wound up with [x * 4]...

The most incredible part? All word of mouth. WxC is not advertising anywhere, yet.

I signed up one of my mates under the friendXchange thing, she signed up a few of her mates as well.

And she is very very happy not paying telecom a cent and is satisfied with her adsl, which says is far faster than her old Woosh ADSL.

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#117052 17-Mar-2008 03:39

freitasm:
ninjabear: Those are my assumptions.You can believe what you want.

So you think "assumptions" have more value than someone reporting a fact?

Facts are sometimes not real if there's no evidence to back it up

Yes I'll just sit here and test 1 million times on speedtest

1 trillion people seems unlikely

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#117055 17-Mar-2008 06:34

Well, here's some facts. I just ran a speedtest off speedtest.wxnz.net and looked at the amount of data transferred:

INPUT:
1030 1177K ACCEPT all -- * * 58.28.13.209 0.0.0.0/0
OUTPUT:
562 173K ACCEPT all -- * * 0.0.0.0/0 58.28.13.209

So that's 1350KB per speedtest, or 1.32MB.

- 775 speedtests per GB.
- 793,600 speedtests per TB.
- 18 speedtests per minute over a month to meet 1TB.

That sounds quite feasible to me - and ignores any other overheads of running the server and it's bandwidth consumption. There are a lot of people who hit speedtest several times a day (why, I don't know - especially considering how flawed the testing is).

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#117062 17-Mar-2008 07:43

Thanks for the calcs PenultimateHop. I was just too lazy to check the download size, but knew it was a bit over 1MB. Note that there is "over" 1TB in speed tests, so it can easily hit 1 million tests a month.

1TB of data brings WxC an income of $1000 per month. That is not much, but it is something which they get from users wasting their time worrying over something they can do nothing about. And the more people worry, the more tests they do. There are many businesses built on that model.

4x the expected growth, I should have bought shares!

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freitasm

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#117069 17-Mar-2008 08:36

PenultimateHop: So that's 1350KB per speedtest, or 1.32MB.

Not quite. According to the FAQ speedtest uses a variable sized payload depending on the connection conditions. 1 MB on cable modem or DSL wouldn't even get a statisticlly correct number to derive speed. I think this 1 MB is just the initial probe.

For example 1 MB download on dialup is valid for a speedtest, while 10 MB is more likely required on a DSL connection.

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#117097 17-Mar-2008 09:48

freitasm, that is quite true. I was going to comment on 1MB being a poor filesize choice for testing anything due to windowing not having a chance to kick in.

Looking at the connections the app makes, it grabs a small file to determine latency - I wonder if that is then used to determine the payload size? Latency isn't a fantastic example of bandwidth (due to aforementioned windowing), which is one of the many reasons these test systems are largely flawed.

My speed test example was done off a fairly slow connection this morning which would explain why the chosen payload was just over 1MB.

Either way, even at 1MB per test it's quite believable for 1T of data to be shifted, and at 10MB per test it's definitely believable. Not sure why ninjabear thinks it's so unlikely!

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#117101 17-Mar-2008 09:52

I think ninjabear is being unreasonable - that's why I didn't even answer his prevous reply on this page.

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freitasm

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#117193 17-Mar-2008 18:01

I have contacted someone I know at Ookla, the company that distributes the infrastructure for speedtest.net and other sites. He pointed me to this document explaining the speedtest process.

I also asked him about the payload for testing and I was told that the largest payload is 40 MB, but most connections use 10 MB for testing.

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Xnet

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#117524 19-Mar-2008 13:40

Thanks Mauricio for starting this thread.
To settle all of the debate, math and speculation, I can tell you- yes there is more than a TB of speed test traffic running every month. That, combined with users leaving their torrents going full tilt 24/7 will contribute to occassional congestion. If more users would set their torrents to a slower speed during peak hours and let 'em rock n roll after midnight, they would wake up in the morning and still have their file without having such a big impact on theirs and others standard surfing and youtube traffic. It doesn't matter how much bandwidth we throw at the International side, it will get eaten. And just to settle arguments, we do not rate limit any torrent traffic at Xnet. The only thing we block is outbound SMTP on dynamic IP addresses from DSL which is common in the industry and helps get rid of spam. My son is a World of Warcraft maniac. If Xnet's international speeds were too slow, I would know it if a minute. The Director of Operations is a Battlefield fan. If he was experiencing lag, you can bet he would be ordering more bandwidth. Of course there are economics involved.

To the issue of Help Desk wait times. YES- they have increased. We are doing our best to ensure subscribers get the best possible experience with VoIP. This means that we are having to provide technical support for equipment set up. We publish the configurations for the devices we support but people still seem to want to tinker with them. When it doesnt work, they call us and those calls tend to have a higher resolution time than actual Internet access issues. Have you noticed that the vast majority of people complaining that VFX or the DSL isnt working; the thread ends with Maverick or one of the other knowledgable bloggers helping them change something on their end to elimiate the symptoms? Often the thread goes from Xnet sucks to "Oops, I accidentally set my device to work as a blender," thanks.

Maybe there is a market for an on-line or subscription based technical hardware support service. If any of you want to set that up, we would be happy to direct CPE set-up to your business so long as the technical skills are there.

Keep up the good dialog and I'll keep watching.

Cec

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#117527 19-Mar-2008 13:51

Just getting back to the number of Fusion subscribers that have signed up, I saw the offering, and told my mate about it, he signed up before I did and told his family who are also signing up, the guys at wotk are looking at it and so on etc.

Re 1TB on speedtest, should I turn off my speedtest bot? :)

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#117535 19-Mar-2008 14:19

Xnet:
Maybe there is a market for an on-line or subscription based technical hardware support service. If any of you want to set that up, we would be happy to direct CPE set-up to your business so long as the technical skills are there.

I can see a huge market for this as people move towards a VoIP and/or naked ADSL solution. If you want to use exiting wiring it's going to mean making changes to your existing wiring which is something many people do not have the knowledge to do.

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