Félix Gaudin | UC Louvain
Supported by Belnet
Lightning Talk | TNC23, Tirana, Albania
WHY YOUR INTERNET IS BAD!
During the Covid crisis I followed my course using Microsoft Teams. In many cases the video/audio quality was really bad, and yet none of the speed tests I ran showed any abnormality. What happened? At that time, speed test websites only measured throughput. Latency is measured as well, but as idle latency (without load on it). However, when you attend a class/meeting there are always other apps/people using your network.
We need a way to measure working latency. The IETF has started to develop a new measurement technique called RPM to measure latency under working conditions. Our goal is to implement it in a browser so that every user will know why their connection is poor. Moreover, all current tests work with TCP connections. With TCP it is possible to send a large amount of data, but it's very hard to accurately measure latency or packet losses. Meanwhile, many cloud providers are moving towards HTTP/3 with the QUIC protocol. Therefore, we are developing our measurement tool with QUIC.
