Quality of Experience tests

Before you play a game, you need to download it. Game console markets make up the majority of new game purchases and can deal with high latency and congestion, especially during the rush of a new game release. The speed of game stores depend on the Content Distribution Networks that host their game files, and ISPs will have varying connection agreements with CDNs, meaning that your performance could vary significantly depending on the ISP you use and where the CDNs are located, meaning download speed performance varies by individual homes. 

We’ve built tests for the following game stores, measuring download speed and latency performance from CDN servers to real users at home. 

This social media tests measure the round-trip latency and reachability of a selection of major social media services.

A single social media site can use a variety of endpoints for different content types (e.g. audio, video) and different activities (downloading and uploading). These tests capture the round-trip latency to all of the supported combinations.

Our video conferencing tests measure round-trip latency and packet loss to the most popular online video conferencing services.

Many different protocols and communications are used during video conferencing. Our measurement focuses on traffic to the video and audio relay servers, as problems on this link will differently manifest as connectivity and quality issues to end users.

We have developed a variety of video streaming measurements that stream real content from major video streaming providers. This allows you to gain an accurate view of how video is delivered to customers.

CDNs are widely used by large websites to distribute static content near to end users. This reduces the burden on the content providers' servers and improves web page load times. CDN operators will place caches inside ISP networks so that traffic does not even need to leave the ISP network. This is beneficial for both the ISPs (it reduces the load on their transit and peering links) and the CDN operators too (it spreads the content serving burden to a wider array of servers).

The SamKnows CDN test measures performance to multiple CDNs by fetching a small object over HTTP. Care is taken to ensure that the same object (or a very similar one) is fetched from each CDN, to provide comparability between the CDNs themselves. Currently an ~80KiB JavaScript library is fetched from each CDN.

Load real pages from real websites to assess browsing performance that users would actually see in their homes rather than to a centralised test server.