AKOS Test Net is an open software project that lets any user measure their fixed, mobile and WiFi Internet connection. Not only in terms of speed and latency, but also the quality and the neutrality. It is an independent tool, improved with the expertise of Regulatory Authorities across Europe and the contributions of thousands of users and collected measurements. The transparency of the methodology and the aggregation of the results, translated to statistics and offered as open data (always respecting privacy and anonymity of the data) makes AKOS Test Net a unique measurement platform for end users, operators, regulators and data analysts with the aim of improving the quality of Internet connection worldwide.

Network speed and latency have a direct impact on the user experience when connecting to different Internet services. From sharing the pictures from your last holiday to streaming the last episode of your favourite series, a slow or unstable connection can result in long download times or low quality video images, which makes every user unhappy. AKOS Test Net provides a way to check your current connection speed and quality, not only in case of trouble, but at any moment and everywhere. In addition, you can check other user’s results on a map, which can helpful when selecting your access network at a given location. Furthermore, AKOS Test Net enables a more extensive diagnostic test, including other parameters as signal strength, or quality in terms of network neutrality (e.g. blocked content, presence of middle-boxes, etc.).

Measuring the speed of a broadband connection is a challenging and complex task, which depends on a variety of factors, such as hardware, location of the server or number of users (specially in wireless networks). There are many online tools that offer tests to find out what is your download and upload speed, as well as the delay in your connection. However, most of these tools are not open source, which means that they keep secret the way in which they measure your connection. Since the actual speed of your Internet connection depends on many different factors, different tools may provide different results if they perform the measurement slightly differently. AKOS Test Net has several characteristics that make it stand out among all the other measurement tools:

Using AKOS Test Net is very easy. We have made it available in the most commonly used platforms and provide detailed information to run the measurement and understand the results. Any type of connection can be tested, independently of the technology. However, there are some aspects that you should take into account before running a measurement:

AKOS Test Net is available as a mobile app for Android and iOS mobile devices. There is a web version as well, which supports all the most common Internet browsers.

Once you have installed your client app or when you visit AKOS Test Net website in your browser, you are ready to start a measurement. The measurement platform makes available several measurement servers, and it includes a control server to manage new connections to clients and taking care of saving the results. In Section 3 you can read more about how the measurement is performed.

Figure 1 shows a simplified view of the measurement platform. The design of the system architecture has taken into account BEREC’s recommendations for a measurement tool [2].

The client tries to establish a secure connection to the control server and they exchange the configuration parameters that are needed to perform the measurement.

This phase aims to get the connection ready to perform the measurements that will follow.

With the information received from the control server, the client can start one or more parallel connections, also called flows, to the measurement server. The number of connections is variable depending on the speed of your Internet connection. In slower connections, a higher number of flows will result on each of them competing with one another for low bandwidth, leading to even worse results and a less accurate measurement. On the other hand, for faster connections, opening several connections simultaneously will allow to reach the maximum capacity of the link faster, improving the accuracy of the result.

In this phase, the client and the server will estimate the optimal number of parallel connections based on the state of the network. They will try to set a higher number of connections if the network conditions allow it. Otherwise, it will be reduced to just one connection.

The number of parallel connections is configurable by the user in AKOS Test Net. However, if you are not sure how to select this number, you can let the client and server decide based on the current network conditions.

In this phase, the client will send several short messages to the server in short intervals, wait for the reply from the server and send a confirmation when this reply is received. Then, the client and the server measure the time between the transmission of their message and the reception of the reply. The measurement result Ping shows the median of all the values measured by the server during this phase.

In this phase, the client requests data through each of the parallel connections to the server (according to the result from the downlink pre-test). The server will transmit the data to the client in chunks of the size indicated by the client. The client, upon the reception of each chunk, tracks the volume of data received and the time needed to receive it.

After receiving the last chunk of data, the client will calculate the download speed of the connection taking into account the values measured for all the connections.

Similarly to the downlink pre-test phase, this phase aims to get the connection ready for the speed measurement in the direction from the client to the server. Again, if the state of the network does not allow it, only one connection will be used for the uplink measurement.

In this phase, the client will send data to the server through each of the parallel connections (according to the result from the uplink pre-test) in chunks of a size established by the client. The server will measure the time and the amount of data received and send this information back to the client. The client, after receiving all the information from the server will calculate the uplink speed.

After finishing the measurements, the client will close the connections to the measurement server and send all the collected data to the control server.

The goal of this test is to detect, whether the content is modified during the transmition of the data between the server and the client in some intermediate network device. The client requests data with a known checksum from the configured web server. Upon reception of the data, the client compares the checksum of the received data to the original checksum. A difference in the checksums indicates the manipulation of the data on the way to the client, and the test is considered not successful.

In addition to checking modifications of the content, we monitor the size and the time it takes to download one or more reference web pages. If the pages can be rendered before a defined timeout, the test is successful.

The use of proxies is a common technique in the current Internet, for instance for caching the most frequently visited webpages, compress content or protect clients from potentially harmful content. In this test, we aim at detecting the presence of proxies between client and server, or "non-transparent" connections. In that case, it cannot be guaranteed that the websites correspond exactly to those on the server. If we detect the presence of such proxy, the test is unsucessful. In this test the client sends correctly formatted HTTP requests, as well as incorrectly formatted HTTP requests to the measurement server. The measurement server reply by sending the exact copy of the request back to the client. When there is an http proxy between the client and the measurement server, it will react to the incorrectly formatted HTTP requests by sending an error message, indicating the malformed HTTP request. In this case, the test is unsucessful.

DNS (Domain Name Service) translates the name of the website we visit on the Internet to an IP address, which will indicate the specific location of the content we can access. It is therefore essential to check if the translation provided by the DNS service can be trusted and is compliant with the network neutrality policies. This test is successful if we can confirm that the DNS data is consistent.

Common protocols used for different Internet services use certain port numbers in their connections. If a certain port is blocked, by the ISP or by the network administrator, any communication attempt through this port will fail. In this test we check whether any TCP or UDP ports are blocked, and therefore certain services are banned, as data cannot be sent or received using those ports. Note that in business environments it is a common practice to block certain ports for security reasons (firewall) or only the relevant ports (and services) are made available.

In this test we measure the distance (in terms of delay and network hops) between the client and a target location.

If you run AKOS Test Net on the browser, you will see other results below the speed and latency, including the location, the total duration of the measurement, how many parallel connections were open during the test and the duration of the upload and download phases, among others. You can click on some of these values to make a more specific search.

On your measurement result page, there is also a graphic representation of the download and upload phases. By clicking on the graph, a table with detailed partial information of the amount of received data and the time will be displayed.

The result page includes as well a map with the location of the measurement, where you can check the location accuracy.

Finally, you can save the measurement results to a file. For more details about how to export data see Section 7.

Several users reported that under certain circumstances, it is useful to run several measurements frequently. The Loop mode allows to set a specific number of measurements (or unlimited, only stopping when the user explicitly chooses to stop) to run at an interval specified by the user, with a minimum interval of 60 minutes.