Network Performance and Assessment Test

Network Performance & Assessment Test

When was the last time your internet provider agreed with you and said that your connection had a problem? Never, right?! "You have no problem, all our lights are Green" is the usual response, yet the bad user experience continues.

Measuring a connection inaccurately will never find a problem, let alone provide the information to solve it. Voradian's Network Performance Assessment System (NPAS) is designed to accurately measure quality, whether the issue is voice quality, poor video, or a cloud application that is frustratingly slow.

NPAS Test tools provides a highly accurate test solution to ensure that our customer's critical network connections deliver the right user experience. It is provided to our customers as a free service for self-testing, and it provides our support engineers with the right tools to assess our customer's networks for quality of service.

There are many so called "Speed Tests" available out there today but the reality is that they are not accurate. Browser only tests that do not require a plugin are simply not capable of performing tests like VoIP, Route or Capacity. In short, they do not measure the true user experience of the Internet. Voradian NPAS does, and Accuracy Builds Trust. You can access our test site from your network at: npas.voradian.com

Common questions relating to our test and your results

Is an assessment test a speed test?

No, an assessment test is a very deep and thorough test that is measuring throughput speed, capacity and packet quality in order to assess the user experience of a connection. This includes efficiency, data loss, recovery, duplication of data, re-transmissions and even corruption.

What is connection efficiency?

The efficiency of a connection is essentially a measure of the increase in delay as the data volume increases. Which would be the most efficient? A 60 mph Interstate with no traffic lights or a 60 mph highway with several traffic signals. As traffic volume climbs, traffic will slow under lighter loads on the highway because of signal delays. A low efficiency connection will affect the user experience more often!

What is the difference between capacity and speed?

One of the biggest misnomers in the market is that more bandwidth is faster. Bandwidth is not a speed - it is a capacity. No mater what anyone says, 2 cars travelling at 60 mph on an Interstate is not the same as 1 car at 120 mph. More lanes on the highway just allows more cars to share the highway. See efficiency?

Why is packet quality important?

Packet quality is a significant issue on all connections. This is because most data on a network has to be in order, to be usable. If packets are lost or delayed, the data arriving to be processed must wait. These delays can be extreme - several hundred milliseconds. Keep in mind that a 100 megabits per second is 100,000 bits per millisecond. A 300ms delay is essentially a 30 million bit hole in the data stream.

What is buffer delay (same as buffer bloat)?

Buffer delay is the metric that fuels efficiency. More delay is less efficient. Many so-called speed test applications report buffer delay but these metrics are almost certainly incorrect. It is impossible to measure true buffer delay unless the test can measure packet quality and health. As an example consider a car being delayed because of a puncture versus a traffic signal. Delays that result from Packet loss, packets out-of-order, re-transmissions, duplicates etc. are not buffer delays but quality delays. The NPAS Server Quality Assessment Test uses a specialized platform that is able to differentiate quality problems from normal delay problems.

What is a MOS score?

MOS stands for Mean Opinion Score? It is an assessment of packet quality for media based applications such as VoIP. The MOS score ranges from 1-5, as a rule of thumb anything above 4 is good, between 3.5-3.9 not so good and below 3.5 will have voice quality issues - poor quality.

What is the difference between VoIP packet loss and data packet loss?

Unlike data packets such as browsing and email, some packet types are time dependent. This is the case for VoIP packets. If a VoIP packet does not arrive in time for the application, it is simply of no use and is discarded. A bit like a car arriving late for a flight versus arriving home for dinner.

Is a connection's trip time important (RTT)?

Absolutely Yes. Trip time is singularly the most important measure of a connection. Sometimes you may see an electronic road signs along a highway that reports ‘minutes to location’ messages. Ask yourself 2 questions: (1) What would you rather see a road sign report? ‘Traffic flowing at 400 cars per minute’ or ‘Time to SFO airport 34 minutes’. (2) If you had to do several trips to the airport in a day, which is faster? Several 2 hour trips or several 20 minute trips?