There are a lot of measurement systems of Internet speed which are publically available. Most of them are based on the measurements between a customer's terminal equipment and the remote servers which are located somewhere in the Internet. This approach is based on the measurements of the end-to-end connection which includes different network segments that belong to different operators (access provider, operator of a core network, ISP, content provider, etc.).
This measurement approach causes the advertised access speed not to comply with the evaluated speed value. The customer is then unable to use the measured speed's values to complain about unfair operators who are providing them with access to the Internet and advertised a certain speed.
Moreover, using the existing measurement systems of Internet speed leads to some problems which prevent operators to rely on the measurement results and use it for managing Service Level Agreement (SLA). This is due to:
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lack of standardized measurement framework - the obtained test results, which were achieved by one method, may vary from results achieved by other method
- lack of standardized measurement procedure - the random measurements can be used during the testing (the testing algorithm is not specified)
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insufficient accuracy - some of the existing methods make several attempts at different times of measurement (the measurement time period is not specified, the Busy-hour does not count)
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different approaches for collecting testing results - the processing of the measured values assumes dropping some measurement results (sometimes up to 40%)
A key problem of the existing Internet speed measurement systems is that it is difficult for the customer to make use of the measured results - the measured Internet speed is related to the end-to-end connection between terminal and independent server. This approach does not allow customers to measure the speed between customer's terminal equipment (TE) and particular Internet resources (e.g. YouTube, Google TV, etc.).
