Test Suite
Overview of all the available SamKnows (part of Cisco) tests
Quality of Service tests
Measuring of the performance of the service provided
Speed tests
Speed is the primary measure by which broadband connections are sold, so clearly it's important to measure it. We offer a variety of different mechanisms to measure speed.
TCP speed test
Our standard speedtest, used on Whiteboxes, CPE and mobile apps.
Hardware-accelerated UDP speed test
This speedtest can take advantage of specific Broadcom and Qualcomm hardware to measure extremely high speeds.
Lightweight capacity test (UDP)
An alternative speedtest that is ultra lightweight in terms of bandwidth usage and time.
WebSockets speed test
A WebSockets and XHR based speedtest for use in web browsers.
Latency, loss and jitter
Latency, packet loss and jitter affect everything you do on the internet. If these fare badly, then every other test will fare badly. So they are critical to measure.
UDP latency and loss
Our standard, continuous latency and loss measure, used on Whiteboxes and CPE.
Contiguous latency and loss
An enhancement to our standard latency test that tracks outages/disconnections.
Latency and loss under load
Measures round-trip working latency which is more representative of actual internet experience, and often much higher than idle latency measurements.
UDP jitter
DNS resolution
The Domain Name System (DNS) converts a hostname (such as www.example.com) into a computer-friendly IP address (such as 192.168.1.1). Every time a user wants to load a webpage, this translation must occur, this test measures how long it takes. It’s configurable and can test against a target DNS server, over UDP or DNS-over-HTTPS.
Voice over IP
The Voice over IP (VoIP) test measures the quality of a voice call between the client and a nearby test server. It is intended to characterise how suitable the user's broadband connection is for placing and receiving VoIP calls.
Traceroute
Traceroute is used to determine the path that traffic takes between a source and a destination. It works by sending packets (typically UDP) with increasing TTLs towards the destination, and capturing the IP that responds with the ICMP TTL exceeded error.
Quality of Experience tests
Measuring the performance of real applications over real infrastructure
Video streaming tests
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.
Netflix
YouTube
iPlayer
Hulu
Multicast IPTV
Shahid
Generic HLS/DASH streaming test
Game stores tests
Modern console games are delivered from online stores such as Steam, XBox Live and Playstation Network. The games can be tens or even hundreds of gigabytes, so achieving high throughput from these stores is important to gamers. The throughput will depend on the CDNs (Content Distribution Networks) that host the games. ISPs will have varying connection agreements with CDNs, which means that your performance could vary significantly depending on the ISP you use and where the CDNs are located.
PlayStation Network
Xbox Live
Steam
Gameplay tests
Our gameplay test measures latency, packet loss and jitter to a wide array of popular online games. The approach varies slightly depending on the game in question, but they all share common characteristics. Crucially, our test performs the measurement to the real gaming infrastructure of the game in question. This is sometimes determined in partnership with the game publisher, sometimes it is determined from publicly available information, and sometimes it is determined by studying the game’s traffic.
League of Legends
DOTA 2
FIFA
Fortnite
Apex Legends
Heroes of the Storm
Diablo 3
Roblox
Overwatch
Among Us
Counter Strike: Global Offensive
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds
PUBG Mobile
Hearthstone
World of Warcraft
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege
Valorant
Rocket League
StarCraft 2
Call of Duty Warzone/Vanguard
Gears of War 5
Halo Infinite
Battlefield V
Video conferencing tests
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.
Google Meet
GoTo Meeting
Microsoft Teams
Skype
Cisco Webex
Zoom
Social media tests
These tests measures the round-trip latency and reachability of a selection of major social media services, taking into account different endpoints that the social media service may use for different content types.
Facebook Messenger
Instagram Messenger
Snapchat
Content Delivery Network (CDN) tests
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. The largest CDN operators will place caches inside ISP networks so that traffic does not even need to leave the ISP network.
Microsoft Azure
Cloudflare
Apple
Amazon AWS
Akamai
Alibaba
Tencent
Fastly
Web browsing
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.
Website performance test
Uses a full headless web browser to accurately capture the user experience of browsing a website from within a user’s network.
Web browsing lite
Measures the time taken to fetch the HTML and referenced resources from a page of a popular website.
In-home measurements
Internet traffic crosses many interconnected networks, but performance is only be as good as the weakest link in the chain. Degradation inside the home is commonly the weakest link, but there is very little understanding and published data about how much performance is actually lost inside the home.
In-home tests
SamKnows is working on a suite of in-home measurements to passively monitor performance to every internet enabled device in the home.
Data usage
Device link speed
Device Latency
Device signal strength
Channel occupancy
