goresponsiveness

Apple has a draft specification for a better way of measuring network quality than just doing speed tests: https://github.com/network-quality/goresponsiveness Their `networkQuality` implementation is on the CLI for any Mac recently updated. It's pretty interesting and I've found it to be very good at predicting which networks will be theoretically fast, but feel unreliable and laggy, and which ones will feel snappy and fast. It measures Round-trips Per Minute under idle and load condition. It's a much better predictor of how fast casual browsing will be than a speed test.

> which is more reflective of real world video conferencing use cases What's more reflective of real world use cases is a hot discussion topic. :) The "networkQuality" tool on macOS and other implementations(1) of the "RPM" algorithm(2) are very good to see how an Internet connection behaves under high stress. But the real world is seldom high stress (100Mbps+ connections are rarely pushed to the limit, honestly). In your example, video conferencing indeed does simulataneous upload and download, but it's also low bandwidth (relatively speaking) and doesn't usually come close to saturating a connection. It can impacted by other traffic in the same connection though. Which can come from a single user, or multiple users sharing the same connection. And neither networkQuality nor Cloudflare's speed test measure how a connection behaves with m

It’s a new proposed standard that’s gaining support. People are building alternative party implementations for it: https://github.com/network-quality/goresponsiveness Try running it with `-s` to see if you get speed tests that resemble what you expect. The idea is that maxing out both links at once is a better measure of network quality than sequence speed tests. Also it’s new RTT metric is key.

Apple's "networkQuality" tool (or the open source alternative that you can run in other operating systems: https://github.com/network-quality/goresponsiveness) is very useful to understand how your connection behaves under extreme conditions, but extreme conditions is not something home connections see regularly, so make sure to use a combination of tools if you want to understand how your home connection behaves under expected use. It's more of an art than a science, really, and your ISP may be optimizing for more average use cases. Personally, I like to start with a regular web-based speed test (I'm biased towards https://speed.cloudflare.com, but any test that shows latency under load is OK, like https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat or https://fast.com [1]) and then combine it with "networkQuality" running concurrently (if possib