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, retransmissions and even correuption.
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? an 60mph Interstate with no traffic lights or a 60mph 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!
The VNA (VoIP Network Assessment) is meant to be a comprehensive test to study network reddiness for Voice over IP services. It includes metrics like Upstream / Downstream Jitter, Packet Loss, MOS scores. It also includes Upload / Download Capacity, SIP ALG Detection and Max concurrent VoIP calls supported by your internet connection. The capacity test portion operates by sending as many data packets as it can towards the testers browser until the testers browser reports not receiving the data packets. This is a more accurate measurement of the overall capacity of an internet connection but not the full assessment of a round trip. Please note the VNA test may take 3-4 minutes to complete.
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 then 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.
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, retransmissions, duplicates etc. are not buffer delays but quality delays. The MyConnection Server Quality assessment test uses a specialized platform that is able to differentiate quality problems from normal delay problems.
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.
Unlike data packets such as browsing and email some packet types are time dependent, as is the case for VoIP packets. If a VoIP packet does not arrive in time for the application is simply of no use and is discarded… A bit a car like arriving late for a flight versus arriving home for dinner.
Absolutely yes, trip time is singularly the most important measure of a connection. Sometimes you see electronic road signs along a highway that reports ‘minutes to location’ messages. Ask yourself 2 questions: