Comparing broadband services on users' terms
Feb 12, 2013: Paying for higher download speeds may not improve your web performance; it also depends on the pages you visit.
Led by Zachary Bischof
Recent studies on broadband services (such as those published by SamKnows in collaboration with the FCC in the US and Ofcom in the UK) focus primarily on comparing the performance of ISPs in traditional networking terms, such as throughput, latency and packet loss.
While increased throughput rates or lower latency should improve user perceived performance, it is unclear how strongly these two are related. For example, for some applications, such as web browsing, subscribing to a faster Internet service will not always result in a better user experience. A range of other factors, such as latency over the last-mile and to the DNS server, as well as the agreements the ISP has with content providers, will also have a significant impact on performance.
In this post, we compare users' download throughput rates with the time it took to load a web page. For this experiment, we include results from bing.com, craigslist.org, and paypal.com, three sites in the top 20 most popular sites (according to Alexa.com). In the figures below, we look at how page loading time is affected by download throughput rate for two ISPs, Verizon and Comcast, across these websites.
First, we look at Bing, a search engine optimized to decrease loading time. Here we see that for users in Verizon's network, page-loading times are fairly consistent for all users (all are less than 500 ms). In other words, increasing download throughput rate does not result in significantly faster page-loading times. Since this website has been optimized to reduce response time, we expect latency to be a bottleneck in improving performance, not download throughput. For users in Comcast's network, on the other hand, page-loading times are higher for many users and show a much wider range, with 33% of users seeing page load times over 500 ms. Again, increasing throughput does not result in faster page-loading times.
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www.bing.com
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Verizon
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Comcast
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Download throughput rate (Mbps)
Loading time (ms)
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Download throughput rate (Mbps)
Loading time (ms)
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Next, we look at Craigslist, a classified ad site as an example of a minimalistic design (few objects to retrieve). Here we see that for Verizon, increasing the download throughput rate appears to result in a decrease in page loading time, but only to a point. Users with a download throughput rate above approximately 5 Mbps see similar page loading times. When looking at Comcast, we again see that increases in download throughput do not necessarily result in faster page-loading times and see a wider variation in page-loading time (as compared to Verizon).
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www.craigslist.org
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Verizon
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Comcast
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Download throughput rate (Mbps)
Loading time (ms)
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Download throughput rate (Mbps)
Loading time (ms)
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Last, we look at page-loading times for PayPal. Compared to the Craigslist example, Paypal has a larger number of objects to be retrieved and therefore makes significantly more requests (about 34 for PayPal and 8 for Craigslist). For users in Verizon's network, we again see that increasing download throughput leads to faster page-loading times. However, similar to Craigslist, beyond a point, further increases in throughput rates do not result in faster page-load times. For Comcast, we again see a much wider range in page-loading times. This time, the range in page loading times is about twice as high as the Craigslist example. This is likely due to the fact that for most Comcast users, download throughput is not a bottleneck in improving page-loading time. Instead, other factors, such as latency and DNS performance may be negatively impacting performance.
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www.paypal.com
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Verizon
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Comcast
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Download throughput rate (Mbps)
Loading time (ms)
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Download throughput rate (Mbps)
Loading time (ms)
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In future posts we'll be further investigating how different metrics (throughput, packet loss, latency, and DNS performance) affect the performance of network applications such as web browsing, video streaming, and P2P, as well as comparing the performance of services offered by ISPs. Be sure to check back for more posts.
Web Performance as Collateral Damage from Remote DNS
Oct 24, 2012: Using remote DNS such as Google DNS can result in poor web performance. Get the best of both worlds—the benefits of public DNS and the best web performance by installing namehelp today!
In a study to be presented at the Internet Measurement Conference in Boston this November, we show how remote DNS services (such as Google DNS or OpenDNS) can actually hurt your overall web performance by inadvertently directing you to download content from far-away servers. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have traditionally provided DNS service via servers located in the ISP's own network—near to the users. Recently we have seen a growing trend of users switching to remote DNS services due to their speed, reliability and security features.
Using remote DNS can actually reduce your web performance due to a poor interaction with Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), which are commonly used by websites to (ironically) improve their performance. This is because CDNs try to direct users to a nearby server for downloading content based on the location of your DNS server. If your DNS server is far away from you (as is the case with remote DNS), you may not be directed to the nearest server, resulting in slower downloads. Our study finds that using remote DNS can double the time it takes to fetch content for 40% percent of users!
(smaller is better)
We have released a tool called namehelp that you can install today to address this issue and improve your web performance. It achieves this by directly contacting CDNs to determine a server near to you. The figure above shows that, for locations where using Google DNS adversely affects web performance, namehelp significantly improves performance compared to simply using Google DNS. For the average user, this translates to a 38% performance improvement!
Essentially, namehelp gives you the best of both worlds—it lets you use remote DNS services while maintaining the best possible web performance. Download and install it today!
Impact of New Zealand Copyright Legislation on BitTorrent Population
Apr 10, 2012: Number of BitTorrent users in New Zealand declines after copyright legislation is put into effect.
Led by Zachary Bischof
On September 1, 2011, the New Zealand government put into effect the Copyright Infringing File Sharing Act, a three strike policy with penalities up to $15,000 and disconnection of service for illegally sharing copyrighted material online.
The plot below shows the number of unique BitTorrent users seen in New Zealand according to data reported by Ono users. In the days leading up to the enforcement of the bill, the maximum number of BitTorrent users seen throughout a day from New Zealand consistently peaks at approximately 1300 users seen in an hour. However, after September 1st, the daily maximum number of peers seen per hour does not surpass 1000, usually hovering around 750 peers. Furthermore, once the law is put into place, the number of peers seen per hour begins to dip below 500 during off-peak hours.
