TM Speedometer FAQ

1. What is a requirement to run TM Speedometer?
   The minimal requirements for this system are: 
   - Recommendation to using browser IE version 7.0 and above with 1024 x 768 resolution for better viewer. 
   - Install the flash player plugin version 9 above. 
   - Enable cookies for bandwidth calculation purpose.

2. How to enable cookies when I use this system ?
   This system using cookies for bandwidth calculation purpose. To enable cookies in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0+, follow this instructions below:- 
   
   - Select "Internet Options" from the Tools menu. 
   - Click on the "Privacy" tab. 
   - Click the "Default" button (or manually 
   - Slide the bar down to "Medium") under "Settings". 
   - Click "OK"

3. What does TM Speedometer measure?
   This Speedometer measures the throughput of the connection from your computer to our network location. The throughput of your Internet service is based on a number of factors, including the distance between your home/office and our network location, the number of "hops" from our network location to your computer, the performance of network servers and routers, the condition of any lines between these two points, environmental factors, and your computer performance. Because many factors affect throughput, your actual experience may vary. The results of this test could be affected by a number of factors inside your home or business, and in the network.

4. What is throughput?
   Throughput is the amount of data moved successfully from one place (e.g., your computer) to another (e.g., any given website on the Internet) in a given time period.

5. How is the TM Speedometer conducted?
   Our speedometer uses the packet train scheme that consists of at least two fleets. It can be used for both downstream and upstream bandwidth measurements. The generated traffic should be smooth rather than busy to avoid excessive ATM traffic shaping.

   The bandwidth measurement scheme runs several times and reports the maximum measured value as the link bandwidth. During the first fleet, a small number of packets, e.g., 5, are sent sequentially back-to-back from the client to the server. This small number of packets will likely not be affected by ATM traffic shaping, as most ATM networks are capable of handling such small bursts.

   The computed result is used in the second step of the speedometer as the trial bandwidth link. The subsequent fleets in our internet speed test assume that the accurate bandwidth is close to the trial result obtained from the first step. A larger number of packets in the 2nd step are used in the measurement to ensure that the results are convergent and in the end consistent.

6. Why does the speed test take a some time to conduct the testing ?
   While testing, the system has to connect to the server and send data for calculation. The calculation process may take several seconds to calculate the downloading and uploading data. Then the data will be sent back to the client. This process might take appropriately 30 seconds.

7. Why should all activity be closed during the testing ?
   To avoid traffic that could cause inaccurate data calculation of throughput.

8. Why is my throughput lower than the line speed I purchased ?
   Communications equipment vendors like to think in terms of low level ATM data rates without regard to the structure or content of the data. ATM is a protocol for transferring data between two points. Internet uses IP as the protocol for communicating, therefore, and in particular, TCP/IP. So your data is going over your DSL line via TCP/IP over ATM.

   TCP has an overhead in transmission that can be about 5-10%, but ATM overhead is more like 15%. So you can expect to lose up to 25% of your purchased speed when measuring application data transfer rate. A rule of thumb: Take a broadband line speed, divide it by 8 and take off 25%, you will get a reasonable estimate of the maximum likely data download speeds (in bytes of data) you will manage to get.

   There are additional factors affecting the throughput results. There are applications running that usually take up a small amount of bandwidth to communicate with their servers, therefore only the remaining bandwidth is available for the throughput test and the results will be lower. The Operating System TCP settings will also affect the results because it is usually not optimized.

   Generally, the results from this test should be close, but less than your rated (purchased) line speed. If you can get close to 70% of your rated line speed, everything is perfect!