🚀 go-pugleaf

I found myself very interested in reading your surveys and I was happy
you included many warnings about the fact that the data may or may not
be accurate because of certain technical limitations. You must have
spent many hours setting all that up.

One problem I can see with these surveys is the fact that you ping the
web servers of each ISP from the network you use. That would give
inaccurate results since you're not connected to that ISP (as you
noted). The biggest problem however is that you rate the ISP's
performance by doing that. I don't connect to Sympatico to browse the
Sympatico pages. I connect mostly to download software, read newsgroups
and to email, therefore you are not even close as to rating the
performance I am getting because my modem doesn't connect to the same
server that contain the sympatico web pages.

If you are to compare two competing ISPs; say Sympatico and Istar by
ping'ing their web pages, there are many things to take into
consideration. First, you admitted to being on the Istar network
therefore swaying the odds considerably. Second is a very important
factor, the web page content. I have visited the Istar pages with a
friend who has an account with them and there is almost no content on
their pages. The Sympatico pages have a considerable amount of content,
which would make it busier during peak times. Third is the fact that you
cannot ping the Sympatico pages (as you noted). You seem to think that
an ISP that doesn't allow pings is evil. I for one as a Sympatico member
am happy to know that the servers I use cannot be ping'ed. I'm not
condemming your setup and the tests you have been performing but can you
imagine the results of hundreds or thousands of people regularly
performing these tests on the same ip addresses? Could it not slow that
server down to a crawl?

I understand you may not have been the one to initiate this discussion
and I don't want to demean the effort you have put in to evaluate the
local and national ISPs that serve the area. On the contrary, I
congratulate you on this undertaking as a service to the public, in a an
area of business that grows at such a fast pace.

Lou




mreid@rogers.wave.ca wrote:
> 
> Please note that this is also mirrored now at
> http://home.on.rogers.wave.ca/mreid/ottisp/index.html . My cable modem
> has been acting up a bit lately, so this URL may be more reliable.
> 
> Unfortunately, performance testing can be quite complicated. The results
> shown favor any ISP on the iStar/MCI or UUNet networks and I've tried to
> include sufficient notice of this on my pages. I want to make that clear.
> 
> iStar is on iStar and Sympatico is on the Bell/CANET network. This tends
> to make Sympatico look worse than iStar. Sympatico doesn't allow their web
> servers to respond to pings. That tends to make Symapatico look better
> again as I'm pinging their last pingable router. Routers often treat pings
> as low priority however...
> 
> Regards,
> Mike.