BarTender: I'm So Ronery. 

No no, as you can see there's plenty of others here with me.

Received an email this morning that is a bit contradictory in that it makes it sound like I am not selected yet, despite previous email asking to update address for shipping.

Also interesting was seeing the amount of data used for testing if you are on a gigabit plan - that's more than what our household uses per month!

freitasm:

 

Received an email this morning that is a bit contradictory in that it makes it sound like I am not selected yet, despite previous email asking to update address for shipping.

 

Also interesting was seeing the amount of data used for testing if you are on a gigabit plan - that's more than what our household uses per month!

 

Same but it did say something about if you had already been selected basically ignore the first part of the email

KiwiSurfer:

 

BarTender: I got the email too.

Will update the post with the slide deck. They do WiFi detection using the mac address of your default route on the lan and adding or removing 1 from the Mac address of the SSID. Which for those running their own WiFi APs won't work but the majority of people use the supplied router and built in WiFi. I did suggest saying that you should be able to enter your SSID in their portal. As that is another easy way to figure it out.

 

I have an unusual set up at home:

 

ONT --> EdgeRouter

 

Then from the EdgeRouter X it feeds three devices over Ethernet:

 

EdgeRouter --> Unifi AP
EdgeRouter --> NanoBeam ~~> NanoBeam --> Unifi AP
EdgeRouter --> Computer

 

I suppose probably not compatible with their test gear—unless they take up @BarTender's suggestion re SSID detection. If they can detect using the SSID I could leave the APs linked directly to the EdgeRouter (for PoE purposes) and just have the computer connected to the Whitebox?

 

Maybe not worthwhile for me to participate for the time being.

 

I have the same setup @KiwiSurfer and @BarTender so asked the question... Here is the answer below. My setup will work...

___________________________

Thanks for contacting SamKnows about volunteering.

I have checked this with our engineer and can confirm the Whitebox will work with your setup,

The set up would be:

[ Internet connection ]----[ wan port on USG ] ---> [[[[ USG ]]] -----[ LAN port on USG to WAN port on Whitebox ] -----> [[[ Whitebox ]]]  -------[ LAN port on Whitebox to Ubiquiti AC access point ] -----> [[[ Ubiquiti AC AP ]]]

hairy1: I have the same setup @KiwiSurfer and @BarTender so asked the question... Here is the answer below. My setup will work...

 

___________________________

 

Thanks for contacting SamKnows about volunteering.

I have checked this with our engineer and can confirm the Whitebox will work with your setup,

The set up would be:

[ Internet connection ]----[ wan port on USG ] ---> [[[[ USG ]]] -----[ LAN port on USG to WAN port on Whitebox ] -----> [[[ Whitebox ]]]  -------[ LAN port on Whitebox to Ubiquiti AC access point ] -----> [[[ Ubiquiti AC AP ]]]

 

It's almost like I answered this question on the previous page.

To me the real issue is if people have a concern with running all their traffic through the Whitebox since it would be trivial for Samknows to capture or profile all the traffic. Because of that the end-user chooses to run a private VLAN / route directly to the internet just for the whitebox and run their normal network on a separate network.

In that situation the whitebox would assume there was never any traffic and would just run tests all the time no matter if it was being utilised or not. That would negatively skew the results for that ISP as the times the internet was in use typically during peak hours the connection would slow because the whitebox didn't know it was being used. That would invalidate any test results that were gathered from that tester in my view.

So I assume Samknows does report back and say "hey we don't see *any* traffic on your network, are you sure you have it connected correctly?"

How long from the time you confirm your contacts details does one get the device? I confirmed my address over two weeks ago.

Not that I'm losing any sleep on it.

BarTender: Just had an email back from my contact at the comcom. He said that they have only just been shipped today from overseas so I would expect them to turn up in a few weeks.

Thanks for the update.

Fibre 'very fast' 700-900 download, 300-400 upload 450 – 600GB

That is way over the top, generating too much data. 600Gb is more than what I use on my 1G plan. On the 2.4Gbps GPON, I certainly don't want my neighbour to be running speedtests all the time.

Besides, I think the test is skewed towards media and speedtest sites which have local caches and local servers.

What is more important is the speed it takes for example, to backup to various cloud storage that people do all the time (like iCloud, Google Photos, S3 etc).

All I am saying is that speedtests and media streaming tests have been done to death, and is not a problem on our nations internet in general, but the data points that we don't have is how well does our distance and broadband compare to the rest of the world, where they have local data centers for cloud storage and NZ doesn't.

------------------

703:

 

All I am saying is that speedtests and media streaming tests have been done to death, and is not a problem on our nations internet in general, but the data points that we don't have is how well does our distance and broadband compare to the rest of the world, where they have local data centers for cloud storage and NZ doesn't.

 

Agree 100% that current reporting is not really painting the real picture - i.e. delivering the economic benefits promised in the business case for government investment in UFB. Substituting satellite TV for broadband streaming has little to do with internet performance.

acjh58:

 

703:

 

All I am saying is that speedtests and media streaming tests have been done to death, and is not a problem on our nations internet in general, but the data points that we don't have is how well does our distance and broadband compare to the rest of the world, where they have local data centers for cloud storage and NZ doesn't.

 

 

Agree 100% that current reporting is not really painting the real picture - i.e. delivering the economic benefits promised in the business case for government investment in UFB. Substituting satellite TV for broadband streaming has little to do with internet performance.

 

Yeah, while the technology in the box to generate synthetic traffic is promising, I really think they need to rethink the 'test bench' to be more representative of the 'promise' of the type of use that benefits new zealand economically. Think of traffic like imports and exports, grabbing content from overseas is your import sector, what are we doing about export?

A whole bunch of people being able to stream netflix or youtube without buffering is hardly the business case that the nation should be spending billion of dollars investing in, they go to off shore tech companies which don't even pay tax here.

Why are placing a bunch of local probes within NZ even helpful? All you're doing to testing the handover capacity between the LFC and the RSP, and where the RSP peers locally.

Also generating a whole bunch of speedtests from 3000 whiteboxes does nothing more than to slow down speedtest servers or to congest your IX peering a little bit more during peak periods, potentially impacting real users.

703: A whole bunch of people being able to stream netflix or youtube without buffering is hardly the business case that the nation should be spending billion of dollars investing in, they go to off shore tech companies which don't even pay tax here.

stinger:

703: A whole bunch of people being able to stream netflix or youtube without buffering is hardly the business case that the nation should be spending billion of dollars investing in, they go to off shore tech companies which don't even pay tax here.

All the major players (Netflix, Lightbox, Neon, Google and Spotify) pay GST on revenue raised from NZ customers. And if the business case is not for customers who stream video, what is it? I can't think of any other case where ADSL is not sufficient. (for me higher upstream bandwidth helps with my off site backups)