Feb, 2002 : Keynote and Boardwatch Publish Backbone Performance Study

📅 February 5, 2002 - Keynote Systems (keynote.com) and Boardwatch Magazine(boardwatch.com) have produced their first study of pure backbone performance as a comparative shopping guide for organizations evaluating Internet backbone services and ISPs purchasing backbone bandwidth.

The Boardwatch/Keynote Backbone Testing Study, in the Boardwatch Buyer'sGuide and Backbone directory published in January, is a pilot study using anew methodology in preparation for an industry-standard ranking of backboneperformance to be published in the magazine's May issue. The current pilotstudy measured the performance of 27 backbone providers; the May study willmeasure an expanded number of providers over an extended period.
In the results of this initial pilot study, Genuity, Cable & Wireless, ICCXand Qwest top the list as the fastest providers among those measured.
"Keynote is moving to a more absolute measure of backbone performance andcontinuing to refine our statistical presentation for maximum accuracy inreporting results," said Eric Siegel, principal Internet consultant withKeynote and co-author of the study. "The results we see in this study areall reasonable. We invite comments and cooperation from all ISPs in thiseffort."
Keynote and Boardwatch have partnered since April of 1997 to produce aregularly published performance survey of ISPs, previously evaluatingbackbone Web hosting. The new study is a significant departure with itsfocus on pure backbone performance. In order to most accurately representpure Internet round-trip time, results are based only on the time requiredto open a TCP connection to the selected file on a single Web server, whichinvolves no applications overhead and eliminates the complexities introducedby distributed server technologies. Measurements were taken overhigh-bandwidth, non-congested links to represent the end-user experience onwell-maintained corporate connections, and eliminate the effect of a slowlast mile.
The backbone providers in the study are ranked in performance groupsaccording to geometric mean results, and then further sorted by performancevariability. Almost all had error rates better than 0.25 percent; two had anerror rate of approximately 0.5 percent (Winstar and MCI Worldcom/UUNET);and three had an error rate of approximately 1 percent (Aleron, AboveNet andCogent). Touch America, ICG and Cogent comprise the slowest performancegroup. The additional providers included in the study are: Ardent/CAIS,AT&T/Worldnet, Broadwing, e.Spire, Excite@home, Fiber Network Solutions,Globix, Level3, One Call, Optigate, PSInet, Savvis, Sprint, Verio, XO, andWilliams.
The backbone study is based on over one million measurements, taken every 15minutes from 53 of Keynote's automated measurement computer links to the 12leading end-user ISPs in the 25 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S.between Nov. 3 and Nov. 26, 2001. The full results are available fromBoardwatch, published in its Buyer's Guide and Backbone directory.