Australian YouTube users are now able to enlist Google’s help to determine the quality of their ISP’s service speeds.
Following on from the success of Netflix’s monthly report cards detailing the best performing service providers, Google has published its own Video Quality Report to appear as a YouTube button capable of producing a report card on individual ISPs.
Google’s reports are determined by the ISP’s ability to stream HD quality video from its content delivery networks, and unsurprisingly Australian services haven’t fared overly well. Just four received gold star recognition while the notoriously average Dodo ranked among the nation’s slowest alongside budget providers Beagle Internet and Amnet Broadband, according to Gizmodo.
Consider yourself lucky if you’re a customer of one of Australia’s top four performers- Telstra Cable Broadband, Service Elements and NBN providers SkyMesh and Activ8Me.
Check out Google’s slightly more intrinsic explanation of its ISP test below.
“A typical YouTube video playback consists of a YouTube client (player) fetching video bytes in a streaming fashion from a YouTube server (CDN), in one or more requests (e.g. HTTP GET). The first step in determining ISP ratings is to measure the sustained speed at which these video bytes are transferred from server to the client. To measure the achieved application level throughput (goodput), the following are recorded for each request:
1) Request Identity: The originating request’s timestamp, access network (e.g. network block, autonomous system number of ISP) and the coarse geographical location (e.g. country, metro), derived from client attributes such as IP address, User Agent, etc. Note that the IP to location translation done by our automated systems may return a location that is incorrect for some users.
2) Response Size: The number of application bytes (including application headers but excluding any kernel level overhead) transferred by the server to the client, in response to the request.
3) Response Time: The time taken to service the request by server, including network transmission time (all bytes acknowledged by the receiver).
Based on these measurements, the goodput for a given request ‘R’ is computed using the formula below. Each measured request is considered a goodput sample.”
