[progforlyfe]

that's nuts, unless I'm missing something, it doesn't seem like those products are that mind blowingly complex... wow. Makes we want to try building my own for the hell of it.

Downdetector in fact just seems to be a website catalog with essentially a guestbook and hit counter...

[eddythompson80]

Of course they are not complex. They do have a network effect though. If you go to your local ISP and say “hey, my 500mbps plan is only doing 100mbps on Speedtest.net”, they’ll “fix it” (usually by working with Ookla to put an edge endpoint on their network)

If you tell the “hey frankyspeeddetect.com isn’t doing my 500mbps” they’ll tell you to it’s an issue with that random website. ISPs and services reach out to Ookla to onboard with them because they have a network effect/mindshare of whatever you wanna call it

[thayne]

When I used a major cable ISP, often my connection seemed slow, so I'd go to speedtest.com. The speedtest would be fine... and then I would magically have faster network performance again.

It happened enough times that I'm suspicious the ISP had some way to detect if you run a speedtest, and then prioritized traffic to that customer.

[simmonmt]

This was one of the reasons given, at the time, for why Netflix created fast.com. It's served by the same infra that does their streaming, and is thus difficult for isps to game. That is, it'd be hard for them to do some hack to make fast.com numbers without also benefiting Netflix streaming performance in the bargain.

[dmurray]

Actually I thought Netflix had already acquired Ookla / speedtest.com, so I was surprised to see this headline. But it looks like this was just the Mandela effect.

That said, why didn't Netflix acquire the market leader in this space? Creating their own seems way less useful, since network effects are the whole point.

[fragmede]

Because Netflix doesn't care what your connection to speedtest.net is, they care what your connection to your closest Netflix server box is. A while back, Comcast/your last-mile ISP was throttling traffic to Netflix to get Netflix to pay them. So while Netflix's box had plenty of bandwidth to their ISP, your ISP wasn't using it, intentionally. Fast.com was their response to that, so you could blame your ISP and not Netflix for being slow.

[eddythompson80]

That’s a really over simplification of the issue. Plenty of Netflix edge CDNs are (and always were) ISP hosted. It’s a win-win for both and a complete no-brainer. The ISP v. Netflix argument was always about contract and margin negotiations. Flat rate, usage percentages, minimums, maximums, special plans, cuts, etc. who has the upper hand in the negotiation so to speak. Funnily enough the repeal of net neutrality gave those smaller ISPs much better position in the negotiation with big tech, not necessarily Comcast. The internet discord focused on Comcast and Verizon because fuck those guys. Who is gonna argue in favor of Comcast or Verizon? But the real winners were thousands of smaller regional ISPs.

[dmurray]

I meant, acquire the speedtest.net domain and point it to servers inside Netflix' farm.

[mcintyre1994]

Based on Accenture acquiring them, I’d guess the actual business wasn’t really interesting to Netflix. And that leaves the infrastructure, where the value they get is it being Netflix infrastructure. I can see why they spent the money on a really good brandable domain instead.

[eddythompson80]

> It happened enough times that I'm suspicious the ISP had some way to detect if you run a speedtest, and then prioritized traffic to that customer.

ISPs definitely know when you run a speedtest.net test. 90% of the time, the data for that comes from boxes/services they host themselves. It’s not exactly hidden either. It’s a typical program any ISP can sign up for and you can easily see the destination the test is running against. I won’t be surprised if some have some logic to prioritize particular subscribers plan once they have detected a test from them. They probably view it as a “customer support calls reduction” feature.

[Suppafly]

>When I used a major cable ISP, often my connection seemed slow, so I'd go to speedtest.com. The speedtest would be fine... and then I would magically have faster network performance again.

Yeah, I suspect you could script it to do it daily. They definitely seem to deprioritize traffic from people that don't complain.

[fragmede]

http://speed.cloudflare.com is a bit harder to argue with though.

[cheema33]

I had not heard of http://speed.cloudflare.com either. I just tried it and I did not get accurate numbers. wifiman.com, from Ubiquiti/Unifi team does provide more accurate numbers. fast.com numbers are pretty accurate as well.

[fragmede]

> I did not get accurate numbers.

That's why speedtest.net is a great purchase for Accenture. Of course Cloudflare's speed test is accurate: it's a test of how fast your connection is to their network. No more, no less. That their network doesn't have the same PoPs means it'll have different numbers than Ookla's test, your ISPs advertised numbers, Netflix's test, and any other speed test. But for people that don't see the Internet as a pile of different interconnected networks, the conclusion that a particular test is inaccurate is a win for Accenture.

[amelius]

I'm a huge fan of https://speed.cloudflare.com/ and you'll have to come with better evidence. Also fast.com doesn't even give upload speed and latency.

[andylynch]

Sure it does.

Just tap ‘More Info’ to show them

[TheScaryOne]

That's not the point of fast.com

Fast is a one click solution to finding out your download speed from Netflix.

Latency doesn't matter, nor does upload.

[is_true]

They serve so many sites that they are probably the best test there's now.

[tverbeure]

The difference is that until now I had never heard of speed.cloudflare.com before. (I know about fast.com though.)

[eddythompson80]

All these numbers are fake. They are all special cased in most ISPs with the cooperation of cloudflare, Netflix, OOkla, Akamai, Google, etc. The centralization of the internet around AWS, Azure, Google, Netflix, Cloudflare, etc has been a godsend to ISPs and the internet infrastructure in general. Maintaining good network conditions to 4 or 5 dozen networks and working with them closely is so so much easier than maintaining full peer-to-peer network conditions. Go ahead and try to test internet speed to your home network over a wireguard VPN and compare it to the performance of the same VPN when connecting to any of the major services. Try to setup a tunnel between your house and your friends house in the same city and test the speed and compare it to fast.com or cloudflare.com or speedtest.net

[fontain]

Ookla has huge amounts of data, speedtest’s software is integrated into networks and used by hundreds of millions of users, they have the most comprehensive information about internet connections. You can recreate the software but you can’t recreate the data without decades of integration into what seems like every network.

https://www.ookla.com/ You can see an overview of the data they collect and sell on the corporate website

[Seattle3503]

The valuation must be outside of the tech. Are there relationships or contracts Accenture is getting access to?

[cortesoft]

Clearly. They are buying all the servers that are already imbedded in ISP networks.

[awakeasleep]

or overlapping board members who are essentially paying themselves

[adammarples]

You don't pay to use ookla speed test, so your data is the product. That data gets sold.

[thefourthchime]

it must be

[sowbug]

thefacebook.com was developed in a few days, too. The value was never in the code.

[rozenmd]

the best part is Downdetector is inaccurate as hell - if AWS is genuinely down, folks get curious and search other providers, causing Downdetector to mark them as down too

[tjoff]

Just searching surely does not mark them as down?

[jedberg]

That's exactly how it works. The website is just a counter of how many people landed on the page searching for "is $X down"

[tjoff]

I don't know but I really doubt that.

When you search for a service you get the current status and you get the option to report a problem.

The minimal you expect from such a service is to keep track of how many % of users are searching also reports an error. There might of course still be errors but that alone surely can't be it. But please correct me if I'm wrong.

edit: and their own description only mentions actual reports https://downdetector.com/methodology/

[Xenoamorphous]

It does.

[NetMageSCW]

Evidence?

[progforlyfe]

I don't have any proof but it sounds plausible; they also have an interactive button (does not require any login), so it could be that they rank the interactive event higher, but still count plain views as something. I'd say it's a fair indicator at least on a basic level.

[kingleopold]

dont miss it, its almost all about users and revenue not how complex or simple product is.

[maccard]

You’re not paying for the tech, you’re paying for the name and the users. Speedyest claims 40m unique users per month.

[UqWBcuFx6NV4r]

The fact that you think that the code is all that material here is exactly why you aren’t the person to be doing this. Go right ahead.

ZIR SV culture has built multiple generations of nerds that think that they can just effortlessly become billionaires. Ridiculous brain rot.

[dyauspitr]

The valuation is the name recognition and that that’s where people go to do those things

[kobalsky]

speedtest has a lot of volunteers hosting local servers, which you need to do a good last mile speed test.

that capilarity is not something you can achieve overnight.

[guessbest]

That's a lot of money just for network topography, but may someone let them in and it has a whole map of an otherwise hidden or inaccessible network.