The FCC’s tool lets you measure download and upload speeds, as well as latency and jitter (the last two are important for video and voice applications).  Nobody talks about latency and jitter and that is a shame.  For high quality video conferencing, less than 20ms of jitter is best.  Latency less than 30 ms is excellent. 

If you want to test your Internet connection, you must choose what type of consumer are you, home or commercial, including street address and zip code.

The test include upload and download speeds and latency and jitter to the service provider. Results are comparable to speedtest.net, a site that also utilizes OOKLA technology.

The FCC site also provides an Iphone application to measure network performance on a WI-FI network using a smart phone.

If your Iphone is connected to a WI-FI network, your results will reflect the speed of your broadband connection. If you disable Wi-Fi and then perform the test, the results will reflect the performance on the 3G network provided by At&T.

I believe this to be a great step to forcing greater transparency in the Internet access space and eventually will force Service providers to increase speed and lower costs.

There are many challenges organizations face when it comes to administering and maintaining a dedicated pre-production or staging environment for which accurate performance testing can be conducted. The cost to manage and maintain infrastructure, along with personnel and facilities, can be fairly sizeable and are only a subset of the overall costs to be considered. So, in many cases performance testing can be rather expensive and this is exactly why virtualization can provide significant benefits because there is cost reduction across the board. A prime example is in many performance labs there are a variety of application performance tools typically utilized for testing – one such tool is HP LoadRunner or Performance Center. These tools are a primary part of a performance lab as they provide load generation capabilities and can accurately test applications under real world load and stress scenarios. However, these solutions require a significant amount of infrastructure and resources (A Controller to execute tests, LoadRunner Generators to produce user traffic, Virtual User Generator to record scripts, etc.) and this can make it very difficult to manage the environment when it has to scale to meet higher demand. In this case, virtualization saves time, effort and cost because resources can be allocated dynamically within the environment and any number of virtual machines can be leveraged when needed to handle these resource intensive applications. This is also enabling many organizations to architect and customize elegant configurations that more closely align with their testing requirements – which can minimize unnecessary infrastructure and resources. Yet, the prevalent issue many organizations still grapple with is how to execute performance tests that accurately depict the network for which the application will be deployed across.

The most pervasive approach that many organizations would take is to physically deploy hardware (remote load generators) in offices that they wanted to test an application from. This process was not only time-consuming, but also expensive, inaccurate and cumbersome to manage. For this reason, HP decided to form a partnership with Shunra to develop a seamless solution that provides this capability within the HP LoadRunner and Performance Center solutions – Shunra VE Desktop for HP. This solution aligns very well with the virtualization movement because it is simply a plug-in within the HP products that introduces the network into the existing test bed and can be leveraged across most virtual platforms. For LoadRunner 9.5 and later, there is simply a “WAN emulation” tab that can be accessed from within the Controller to introduce the latency, jitter, packet loss and bandwidth constraints directly into the test. With Performance Center 9.5 and later, this capability can easily be configured directly from the browser UI to allocate WAN emulation parameters across any number of desired load generators. A consequence of this is that organizations can leverage on-demand performance testing from a dynamic virtual environment that is agile, flexible and robust. This therefore eliminates the need to manage testing cycles across multiple time zones and remove any need for additional hardware. Additionally, all of the network metrics from each generator utilizing WAN emulation within the test will automatically be imported into the controller, which can save a significant amount of time when collating results and generating analysis reports. These reasons are precisely why numerous organizations have decided to improve their existing performance test environment with the VE Desktop for HP Software  solution. Not only does this solution address a strategic gap within the functionality of the HP solutions, it embraces virtualization as a means to more effectively administer performance testing. Overall, the VE Desktop for HP Software solution was co-developed with HP to considerably enhance the accuracy and value of these application performance test suites.

Netflix is distributing among thousands of its subscribers an online survey (see below) to float the idea of a new streaming service, this time targeting Iphone users. If you are a Netflix subscriber, you can enjoy instant access to thousands of movies on their “instant access” service, allowing users to stream content directly from the company’s servers, using a PC or dedicated devices. Today this technology is based on Adobe Flash ®.   This is not available to Apple oriented users (MAC, Iphone or IPad) and the survey indicates a willingness to part ways with Flash, a move being contemplated by many content providers, in order to facilitate streaming and other dynamic context to non Microsoft platforms.

The Iphone has been out in the market for a couple of years and it is the debut of the IPad that is prompting services and vendors to ramp up their offerings for the Apple platforms. I guess the Iphone service will be just a dress rehearsal for the real thing, Netflix streaming movie content to the IPad. Another indication that IPad is the real target, is that the service will initially work only on Wi-Fi and not on 3G, resembling the Apple offering on the lower end IPad platform.

On February 17, the Chairman of the FCC (Federal Communication Commission), Julius Genachowski, proposed a decade long program to provide a minimum of 100 MBPS link access to every household in the US.  The Chairman said the FCC plan would set “ambitious but achievable goals” in remarks to the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners conference.

Genachowski said speedier Internet service would help create jobs and economic growth.

Data shows that about 64 percent of U.S. households used a high-speed Internet service in 2009, the Commerce Department said on Tuesday. That is a 25 percent increase from 51 percent two years earlier.

Some internet providers already called this program “unrealistic”, given the current estimate of the average access speed at less than 4 MBPS. However, Verizon, the third-largest provider, and one that has a more advanced network than many competitors, said it has completed successful trials of 100 Mbps and higher through its fiber-optic FiOS network. Today, Verizon offers programs with 50 MBPS access, at a premium.

The FCC announcement should not come as s a surprise, given Google announcement from the beginning of February that it will pilot a deployment of 100 MBPS links to certain communities. Not surprising, the first newspaper to report this development was the Korean Times, the country with the most widely available high speed Internet service for home consumers.

Why 100 MBPS matters? Obviously, it will open the possibility for stay home Moms to join the work force by becoming part of corporate networks; will open great opportunities for home-schooling connected to on-line interactive schools and colleges and open a whole new world of entertainment and leisure activities, like interactive TV, collaborative gaming, real-time social interaction and more.

The key message is very clear – BIG pipes and FASTER applications are on the way.  We need to ensure this new environment can handle our demands.  Shunra technologies allow you to emulate the network environment, introducing real world impairments to test those media rich applications in a controlled lab environment. Shunra has been providing this capability for more than 10 years and now, more than ever, is the time to prepare.

Given the application traffic requirements, the challenge is not going to be the amount of traffic (Throughput) , but rather the network conditions, or impairments, that are affecting how the application traffic is going to be transmitted over the network, eventually arriving at the corporate data center south of the nation’s capital.

Using VE Catcher 4.6, a model of the latency and packet loss characteristics was created, for a period of 10 days. Two separate devices where utilized, on one AT&T 3G network, the other, on the Sprint network, to ensure carrier availability (the project call for a 50% split among the networks).  A pilot site, south of the data center, was selected, and VE Catcher created two parallel recordings, one for device “A” and another for device in the alternative carrier.

Once the behavioral model has been created, Shunra’s Virtual Enterprise appliance will allow creating a “test-bed” where the application will be sending real traffic to the data center over an emulated link. The network conditions will be imported from VE Catcher and reflect the exact conditions observed at each of the 3G carriers.

The performance of the application, running over the emulated links will allow the testing team to predict the behavior of the application well before field deployment is completed, and make adjustments required by the application and also predict behavior under extreme conditions, like heavy network traffic, inclement weather or other events.

You may not always use WAN emulation, but when you do, use Shunra.

Shunra Virtual Enterprise is your guaranty to a successful deployment.

When do these issues become as important in LANs as they are in WANs? Probably when our LAN becomes huge – such as Cloud computing Data Centers.

These Data Centers are interconnected with each other and one of the main differences with our traditional Data Centers is that they are managed automatically by very complex and smart management systems. These systems are capable of automatically allocate hardware and software resources for our applications, maintain these resources and expand/decrease capacity of the infrastructure based on the application demands almost in real time.

So imagine that the system is scheduled to perform an OS upgrade on the managed infrastructure: it will download OS images on thousands of machines thus creating huge traffic congestion within the Data Center. What will happen to the system that knows only how to work on LAN and was never tested on coping with delays? Packet Loss? – it might go down partially or completely. Since it was not tested – how can we know? (Sounds a little like Skynet scenario in Terminator, doesn’t it?)

The importance of the management system performance becomes utmost in this case and it makes sense to test how the system will react to the issues that now might happen within it, doesn’t it?

This is where WAN emulation solution can help – it can create those conditions within the Data Center or between the Cloud Data Centers and the “unexpected” can become “expected” and fixed.

Due to current events the timelines for testing and certification had become critical and the contractor responsible for the project was under enormous pressure to complete this engagement quickly. In conversations with the contractor prior to arriving onsite, I asked a series of questions intended to reveal the lab environment and methods of test traffic generation.  It became clear that some big action items that needed to done in order to achieve the requisite environment and deliver all of the desired results was still unfinished.

Some of these dependencies included….

• Reaching consensus among all the constituent groups as to what would constitute the physical test network as well as the specific impairments to define the characteristics of the circuits to be recreated within the Shunra scenarios.
• Confirmation of existing test scripts of the application for both the QTP and HP Performance Center traffic generation tools.
• Communication between the contractor (Project Manager), network equipment vendors, QTP and Performance Center engineers and Shunra to ensure that each step in the process was coordinated to proceed in an orderly sequence.

As these conversations took place it became evident that the project manager had never been exposed to the complexities associated with the range of technologies and the number of disparate groups required to compete the task. I cautioned him that to guarantee timely completion of all these steps a meeting should be scheduled to include all the participants prior to arriving onsite. Shunra offered our Professional Services to act as the Project Manager to broker to meeting and to coordinate the project execution. The key benefit to ensure that all parties would be fully prepared to execute their tasks when needed. This offer was declined. The meeting never was organized and the timelines of the engagement suffered accordingly.

Once onsite the network engineers and Shunra spent considerable time connecting and configuring the test lab to allow communication between all of the known test devices. After completion a member of the Performance Center group popped into the lab and informed us that some traffic needed to be initiated from end users on another network in a different building. This change mandated a complete reconfiguration effectively wasting hours of work. Only after completion of this task did the contractor learn that no test scripts had been created to exercise the application. Script creation could potentially add days or weeks to the completion of the project.

Meanwhile the representative from the Agency requesting this evaluation would appear every ten minutes asking whether the job was done. As the sweat poured off the brow of my contractor I could only shake my head and think…..Told you so…..

The lesson to be learned is that Shunra has a cadre of experienced professionals that can deal with the complexities of these engagements. In a proactive systemic process we can anticipate all contingencies and implement best practices honed over years of direct experience. With this expertise from our Professional Services group the scoping, timing, and delivery of test results are guaranteed.

The contractor is still in stasis awaiting his test scripts and that Federal representative is still poking his head asking for the results.

Oh well………

The report cites a global average speed of 1.7 MBPS with South Korea retaining the leadership position. As I mention in a previous post, the South Korean government is subsidizing deployment of fast speed internet in their quest to integrate the population from rural areas into their workforce. In the US, the reported average is 3.9 MBPS, declining from a year ago, with some exceptions, like Utah, Massachusetts or District of Columbia, all of those places showing a remarkable 15% increase from last year.

This report must help dispel the myth that Internet access is universally equal and unpredictable; in fact, it is quite simple to measure Internet access behavior patterns for individual locations or regions (associated with an Internet POP) and incorporate the methodology into the Performance Testing procedures.  Shunra provide the tools to measure the performance (VE Catcher) and to model the site locations by using VE Suite.

WAN Simulation methodology is a set of theoretical algorithms which are usually applied on a trace file. These algorithms aim to predict applications response times with different conditions and then applied to the captured trace file. A typical use case would be varying the conditions, such as available bandwidth and distance (latency), and then predicting the impact on response time. The main challenge with this approach is that those theoretical algorithms are based on assumptions.  Assumptions, which are in some cases very wrong and skew the results. Typically, with theoretical WAN Simulation you should expect around 70% accuracy.

On the other hand, when we say Emulation (or WAN Emulation) we mean that the application traffic will traverse in real time through a path that is identical to the path we have in mind. An appliance based WAN Emulator or software based WAN Emulation is usually present to create actual network elements in software, bring into account network impairment characteristics, such as distance (latency), bandwidth and loss. The accuracy of WAN Emulation can exceed 99% depending on the level of configuration. We can expect around 95% accuracy from a straight forward automatic configuration.

Another important difference is time. Theoretical WAN simulation may take days to run, but using WAN Emulation the duration is based on the time it takes the application to run.

The main reason why WAN Emulation triumphs is accuracy.

Based upon conversations with both the vendors and potential users of these products it quickly became evident that a renewed focus has been placed on the quality of the end user experience. As deployments of these critical systems were initiated, their positive impact was severely hampered by performance challenges in the field. Limited network capacity and extreme latency impairments were common in remote theaters of operations. Satellite, Microwave, and Wireless connections served to expose these applications to conditions never before tested. The result was extreme variability in terms of the quality of content delivery in the field. The concern expressed by these early adopters of the solutions has required the vendors to reexamine their methods for certifying system level performance prior to delivery.

In this environment, Shunra uniquely addressed all those concerns regarding the recreation of network performance and was able to evaluate the end user experience within an off-line test lab. Using a series of programmed scenarios within the Shunra Virtual Enterprise appliance, we demonstrated the precise capabilities to satisfy the need to recreate the quality of experience as well as the critical root cause analysis of unacceptable performance of the application under real world test conditions.  The combination of empirical data captured and the ability to recreate a day in the life of an end user offers both the vendor and client a solution that this challenge demands.

As a result, Shunra initiated numerous opportunities to engage with these agencies and their vendors and contractors to establish new best practice methodologies to enable the configuration and execution of pre-deployment testing of these complex solutions.