As we all know now, BezeqInt has a quite invasive caching proxy. I wondered how does it affect broadband speed test applications out there. Many of us used them at least once. So i made a google
search and tried a dozen of those on my 15Mbps line. You can see
www.speedtest.net results on the left.
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| Sydney |
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| Tokyo |
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| New York |
Wherever i download from speed is always ~15Mbps. Of course it is too good to be true. Most of the application i've tried used usual http connection to download a test file. Speedtest.net is not an exception so it wasn't a surprise when i found that all the files used in measurements were served by BezeqInt proxy rendering the results quite meaningless. Most interesting part is that speedtest.net generates unique urls for measurements although downloaded file is always the same. Which begs the question: how is it possible for proxy to have this file if url is completely new? Two most obvious answers: proxy has been configured that way or it learned from the usage pattern to "optimize" access to this resource. Any way results are useless because i want to measure my actual download speed from that specific location not the speed from some internal BezeqInt server.
If you want to test your download speed from certain locations i'd recommend
myspeed.visualware.com. This software doesn't use the usual http port therefore doesn't go through proxy and provides results much closer to the truth.
