The internet is under enormous pressure. A quarter of the world’s population is in lockdown, with billions of people relying on home broadband for work, education, information, entertainment, and essential services. We’ve been focusing all our efforts on helping governments and ISPs understand how COVID-19 has changed internet usage almost overnight.
When Cookie, our Head of Design, moved into his new house, he was determined to inspect his in-home Wi-Fi. Using SamKnows RealSpeed 2.0 as a guide, he used his speed test results to help improve his connectivity by 76.6Mbps! Cookie also recently appeared on George Clarke's Old House New Home, and it seemed like the perfect opportunity to bring both projects together.
The Commerce Commission (ComCom) is on a mission to improve the future of New Zealand's internet with their Measuring Broadband New Zealand program. For the last 12 months, we've been busily supporting them by measuring how well the country's internet is performing. We're now looking for more people in rural areas to join us!
Don't let home interference spoil how your customers' perceive your network performance. With SamKnows RealSpeed, your customers can run an independent speed test from the edge of their home network (at the router itself) out to a test server, accurately recording the fastest speeds available, eliminating any Wi-Fi degradation from the results, and avoiding customer confusion.
Back in March, we spoke about how internet service providers (ISPs) are using the SamKnows Router SDK to overcome the limitations of conventional speed tests and accurately measure 1Gbps+ speeds. Since then, we've been hard at work, developing the perfect solution that allows you to do the same from the comfort of your home, without using any special equipment. Find out how easy it is to use!
Analysys Mason is a company that specialises in advising government regulators on the best ways to regulate their telecommunications industry. We’ve long been admirers of their work and are excited to publish our interview with Franck Chevalier, their Co-Head of Technology Consulting, to learn how Analysys Mason helps regulators conquer some of their most prevalent challenges today.
At SamKnows, we're committed to providing opportunities for young people that help enhance their success. Along with Project Margaret Hamilton, a home-grown coding lab for girls, we offer a short internship program that's designed to give you valuable skills and hands-on experience at a thriving tech company. Find out what Annabelle got up to while she was here!
This is the third of a series of articles about our new SamKnows Website Performance Test. Today, we're telling the story of how we used it to detect a hidden problem that was impossible to find any other way. We contacted Sky straight away who where then able to restore good performance for all their consumers. Read on to find out about our investigation.
DNS-over-HTTPS promises to prevent eavesdropping and manipulation of DNS traffic. But this has side-effects that has many ISPs concerned. One of their concerns centers on performance and the impact on their CDN relationships. We've conducted an initial study of DNS-over-HTTPS performance from homes across Europe to help separate fact from fiction.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are opening the Measuring Broadband America (MBA) program to new volunteers in the U.S., to benchmark and improve national Internet performance. We are proud to be part of such an important study. Read on to find out how you can track your home Internet performance and be at the heart of the FCC's policy-making.
Ari is an integral part of the SamKnows backend team. She's travel-mad and multilingual, while also forging a successful career in backend development. Today, we're asking her about why she chose her career, what it takes to succeed, and the importance of creating a healthy work-life balance.
At SamKnows, we have been hard at work developing a new website performance test, called the SamKnows Website Performance Test (we’re pretty “out there” with the name!). In our previous blog post, we covered the overall concept. In this blog post we look at the technology behind it.
EasyInstall is a simple way for installation engineers to provide quick, timely, and successful home visits that leave your customers feeling happy and confident with your service. After connecting a home to the internet, your engineers can use EasyInstall to accurately measure performance, create a customer pledge, and prove you are delivering the internet speeds your customers expect.
The new Instant Test, launching on Monday 22nd July, gives you the power to measure your fixed-line performance whenever you like. As soon as you think something's up, go straight to your SamKnows One dashboard and run an Instant Test to see what's going on. Thank you to everyone who has given us feedback on our products - let us know what you think!
The Western States 100-Mile Endurance Run is the world's first and most iconic ultramarathon. Competitive, hot, and covering formidable terrain, this Californian race is no easy feat. So when Sam Crawford, our CTO and founder, went off to take part, we were proud, curious, and not a little anxious. Thankfully, he came back to tell the tale!
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai recently suggested crowdsourcing data could be the best way to gather information on U.S. internet coverage: the Digital Opportunity Data Collection program. Here, SamKnows proposes the solution that will enable the FCC to create the largest and most reliable dataset possible, at the lowest cost.
Introducing the new way to measure your website's performance - the SamKnows Website Performance Test! This test shows you exactly how long your web page takes to render, and what's slowing it down, using the engine of a real web browser. The first of a three-part series, today we're explaining the problems with conventional testing and how we overcome them.
Two months ago, we asked you to help us improve the future of Canada's internet. We received an overwhelming response, thank you! Today, we're providing a quick update about our progress so far, which is excellent, and encourage those of you who would like to get involved to sign up for a Whitebox - it's not too late.
Inspired by the woman in charge of writing the on-board software for Apollo 11, SamKnows developer Samira has set up an exciting new project to teach young women how to code and overcome unhelpful "myths" about working in tech. We're fully supportive of this initiative, and today we're asking her all about her life as an Android Developer, part of the project's "myth busters" series.
Three years ago, we set out on a mission to learn what we could do to make our team more diverse. Since then, we have found that even the smallest changes, such as using gender-neutral language, can have a significant affect on our hiring processes. Today, we want to share some of our experiences in the hope that we might help other technology companies do the same.
Inscrivez-vous dès maintenant au projet de Mesure de la large bande au Canada - une étude nationale qui permettra de porter un regard approfondi sur la situation des performances d'Internet au Canada et d'en apporter les mesures nécessaires à leur amélioration.
When performance goes down, the stakes go up. The clock is ticking and the pressure is on. Happy customers turn into angry, Hulk-like monsters. With 27 tests and 65 metrics, we can show you exactly what to do to resolve your issues, whether they're Thanos-sized, or so small you'd need an Ant (Man) to identify them.
Unhappy customers can put a significant strain on your support teams, costing you time and money. By working closely with some of the world's leading service providers, we have developed a solution to help you have more happy customers, faster resolution times, a lighter support burden, and dramatically save on your costs.
Now is the chance to help improve Canada's internet performance! Join the Measuring Broadband Canada program - a nationwide study that's taking a deep look into the state of the country's internet to find out what needs to be done to improve it for the future.
Don't let LAN spoil the party. If you're struggling to prove your 1Gbps+ speeds to customers, SamKnows has the solution! Embed the SamKnows Router SDK inside your fleet of routers and overcome the router bottleneck. Show your customers with a 1Gbps LAN interface that you're delivering on your ultra-fast advertising claims.
SamKnows started as a small, highly-skilled team where everyone knew what was going on. Communication was easy, and we scaled fast. But to ensure our rate of change was sustainable, we decided to adapt our internal workflows. Particularly since we're still scaling! Here's what we've learned so far.
At SamKnows, we place great emphasis on the importance of accuracy. A key element to achieving such high levels of accuracy is that we avoid running tests when you're using the internet - we call this cross-traffic detection. Today, we're telling you all about cross traffic, why its important, and how it contributes to your scientific dataset.
Little Village are a small organisation doing great things. By providing second-hand baby clothes and equipment to families experiencing hardship, they aim to ensure that no child in London starts life without the essentials. We're excited to support Little Village, and encourage you to support them too.
The Rapid Build Framework is a system for launching internet performance apps very quickly. Designed for long-term national measurement studies, the app is a cost-effective solution for regulators facing strict budgets and limited technical resources. It's easy to adapt, maintain, and can be ready for testing within a single day.
In September 2018, Virgin Media contacted us about trialling their new 10Gbps FTTH product, testing both the access technology and in-home connectivity. We were delighted to assist Virgin Media and Arris measure these super-fast speeds, using our new 10Gbps Whitebox prototype that we had developed the year before.
We're excited to be expanding our fully-managed test server platform, with the help of Cloudflare's clever Workers. Cloudflare's Workers allow us to run code directly on their network, and incorporate them as part of our internet measurement platform. All the while, we maintain accurate measurement results without breaking the bank.
We asked the Sammies a bunch of questions about what it's like to work at SamKnows. Learn more about what we do, why we do it, and what they had to say… And if you spot one of our job openings, we'd love to hear from you! With offices in the UK and USA, we're a company with a global reach and international reputation.
A behind-the-scenes look at how we develop new measurements. Here's our response to traditional web tests struggling to keep up with faster internet speeds. Read all about how we ensured the new SamKnows Web Test consistently provides accurate results for any speed tier on any browser - laying the groundwork for speeds greater than 1Gbps.
Using the SamKnows alerting feature, we spotted a significant drop in YouTube tests across North America, Europe, and Asia. It's rare to see failures on this scale so we assessed its impact on customer experience using the data we generated. We also monitor other critical services, and can even spot minor performance degradation.
Very, very large-scale internet measurements generate a lot of data. Two years ago, we prepared ourselves for a sudden increase of SamKnows measurement agents in the world - from thousands to millions. Meaning a huge increase in data. So, we built an entirely new cloud-based platform to handle our measurement results: SamKnows One.
In July 2018, the USA's FCC released an updated order, detailing the auditing requirements for ISPs participating in the Connect America Fund (CAF). In this post, we summarise the CAF measurement requirements and how ISPs can meet them. SamKnows also has a solution to help ISP's prove they comply - read on to learn more.
The Cell Audit app is designed for surveying cellular performance in a particular area, such as disaster zones. For Android only, the app runs tests in a continuous cycle, checking for signal availability and collecting environmental data from connected cell towers. Track performance levels by time and location and identify damaged cell towers.
In this article, we put three online storage services — Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft Office 365 Sharepoint — to the test and compare how they perform on different UK broadband providers. All the online storage measurements we reference are available on our Whiteboxes and Router SDK right now.
We’re excited to sponsor this September’s Vue conference in London, running 20th - 21st. Come and join us at the SamKnows stand on the 21st — we’d love to talk to you about our upcoming projects and celebrate all things Vue! Vue is integral to what we do because it’s the main driving force behind our flagship, SamKnows One.
Zen and the art of your Steam library maintenance. Today we’re taking a look at how well the UK’s largest ISPs perform when users download games from Steam. Using our measurement client for Steam, that runs on SamKnows Whiteboxes and the Router SDK, we generated data for analysis in SamKnows One. Here's what we found.
The ACCC is using SamKnows One to measure the quality of Australia's internet and encourage reform. Find out how Australia's internet is faring in their latest report. Following the Initial Findings Report of March 2018, this second instalment gives a more granular analysis on the performance of Australia's internet services.
Speed tests don't always tell the whole story. An unhappy user contacted us about their poor Netflix performance, despite their 100 Mbps connection. Turns out the problem extended far beyond this user! Using SamKnows One, we discovered a routing issue spanning two continents. We quickly alerted the ISPs so they could deploy a quick fix.
In this article, we're taking a look at the technologies used to deliver live TV streams over the internet by the BBC and ITV - the UK’s two largest terrestrial broadcasters. To do this, we ran performance measurements from nearly 700 UK homes during prime time, and then took a look at how the broadcasters, ISPs, and CDNs faired in SamKnows One.
Ofcom are updating their Voluntary Codes of Practice (VCOP) to benefit home and business internet users in the UK. The aim of VCOP is to aid and protect internet users when buying broadband products. ISPs volunteer to follow the codes and need a measurement solution to prove their performance levels. Here's a guide to VCOP how we can help.
Your new open source dashboard. We’re open sourcing a library for you to build customisable dashboards, called DIRK. We built DIRK for the Enterprise dashboard in SamKnows One. DIRK provides an intuitive drag and drop interface, using Vue.js and the HTML5 Drag and Drop API. Let us know what you think!
We're proud to announce two new internet measurement projects with the Australian and New Zealand regulators! Both projects aim to better the internet for everyone. And both projects are using SamKnows data to help increase transparency, direct policies, and update infrastructure. Find out how you can get involved.
We've had an epiphany about how we can help your internet experience. SamKnows creates measurement tools to help ISPs and regulators improve internet performance and customer care. And while we've dramatically improved the richness and accuracy of internet performance intel, we believe we can do more. Time to think differently.
This article was written by one of our front-end web developers, Callum Macrae, about a website performance project he’s been working on recently. Frustrated with images taking a long time to download on the SamKnows website, Callum carried out some research and focused his efforts on finding the perfect solution.
Celebrating all things Kotlin in honour of our Android team (who really love it). We've been using Kotlin as our language of choice for the prototype of our internet performance app for Android. Kotlin suits our needs because it allows us to rapidly model, build, and release our applications, and much more. We couldn't recommend it highly enough!
Last year we launched a home Wi-Fi checker for the UK telecoms regulator Ofcom. Since then, we collaborated with Ofcom and UK ISPs to build the ultimate performance app that's great for all technologies. And today, we're thrilled to launch an update that adds way more features. Read this article to read all about it. And download the app - it's free!
We built a web test for Bell. We love it. It shows Bell users what's affecting their internet speeds. And it's as accurate as can be! This test discounts all in-home factors, like an under-performing PC or a bad in-home Wi-Fi connection - showing you whether there's a problem with Bell's provisioning or an issue inside the home.
We're proud to announce that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has published its Measuring Broadband America report, which is entirely based on SamKnows data. The USA saw internet speeds increase in 2016 - but with plenty of exceptions. In this article, we give you a quick overview of the report's key findings.
Mega update! You can now embed our full suite of internet performance tests directly inside your CPE. Conduct millions of tests from customer homes and analyse the results in SamKnows One. Popular with ISPs and equipment manufacturers, the SDK is suitable for anyone who wants to install our software inside their products.
We were on BBC Watchdog last night. This week’s episode asked the all-important question: are you getting value for money when it comes to your internet? BBC Watchdog found that 35% of those who contacted their ISP with their SamKnows speed test results, saw an improvement. And 13% were offered a discount.
