Revisiting browser and connectivity defaults

[pmeenan]

(03-18-2013 10:52 AM)koop Wrote:  Interesting that Akamai's state of the Internet says the avg speed in the US is 7 Mbps, and Netflix says it's 2.3 Mbps. The truth is probably in between. So, Cable 5M is good, I agree.

Question about latency: Why simulate latency, doesn't that naturally occur from the distance of the test? I'd be inclined to vote for 0ms latency by default.

Averages are evil. High-end connections could easily skew the average way high so I prefer to look at percentiles. The Akamai report has percent of adoption for 4Mbps which was the more interesting piece of data in the report and that comes out at 62% for the US if I'm remembering correctly. That means that 62% of the Internet users in the US have a connection that is at least 4Mbps as measured by Akamai.

WebPagetest traffic shapes the last-mile of a connection only. All tests still have the added latency of the actual geography and routing but different last-mile technologies have different amounts of latency that they add. The 28ms number for cable comes from the 2011 FCC broadband report where they measured the latencies within ISP networks to end users (2012 report numbers are pretty close) and it lines up with other data I have seen as well. Using a 0ms latency for last-mile would give everyone the awesome latencies you see from fiber which isn't particularly realistic.