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mstdn.ca is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
A community for Canadians, First Nations, Metis, and Inuit Peoples of the great white north.

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NEW: Allow us to reintroduce CIRA’s new and improved Internet Performance Test (IPT)! Learn more about how we’ve made testing your connection easier than ever —all while giving back to Canada’s internet: cira.ca/en/resources/news/net-

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@cira Here’s a question for the FAQ: How much data does a test use?

Doing a few hundred megabytes on a 2 gigabyte mobile phone plan is annoying. Though rates have gone down and data limits up over the last 5 years, so maybe it’s not as much a worry today.

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@AGMS00 Hi, thank you for your feedback! CIRA's IPT test moves data back and forth from your device to a server on the backbone of Canada's internet, therefore does consume data to do this. The test uses different amounts of data depending on how fast your connection is. Typically the faster the connection, more data being used.

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For an LTE mobile connection at about 20Mbits/sec the test uses 50 megabytes. Same for a desktop browser with a 15Mb/s connection. Wonder if it explodes when testing dial-up…

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Didn’t get that far. Good old NCF (National Capital Freenet) dial-up seems to have broken authentication today, but I did get my old modem working with Linux.

Still, at 4KB per second, a 50 megabyte speed test would take a few hours.

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Nope, that was a fake login screen, PPP without login seems to be needed. Story about that at web.ncf.ca/au829/WeekendReport

After about 10 minutes (1.5 MB) the speed test screen still wasn’t loaded. Guess it failed the test :-)

I'll have to try the dial-up speed test on the weekend, when I have 5 hours to run it.

web.ncf.caRetro-regression in Dial-Up Speed Tests in 2025
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@cira I finally got things working well enough for a speed test over dial-up Internet, at 3 kilobytes/second. Though to save time, I pre-loaded the browser cache with the speed test site's graphics (would have taken hours). And after all that, the test didn't work. Though at least it had a good error message.

P.S. I was able to log into Mastodon and upload this post over dial-up. After getting FireFox to stop uploading it's internal performance monitoring data, which swamped the connection.

Screen shot of SystemMonitor in Linux, showing a graph of bandwidth usage, hovering around 2.8 KB/s.
Output of ping command, showing lag of 50 seconds at times, typically around 10.
Screen shot of performance test error message, can't measure slower network speeds. Says "No Test Data Captured. Are you connected to the Internet?"

@AGMS00 Hi there, for slower or struggling connections, we offer a stripped down, low-bandwidth version of our Internet Performance Test at performance.cira.ca/mini.

Feb 10, 2025, 05:51 PM·Public·Web
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@cira Thanks, that mini speed test worked on my dial-up connection!

I've added it to my blog post about dial-up in 2025, and coined the word Retro-regression to describe software that loses old functionality over time. That test is one of the few that works correctly at slow speeds.

web.ncf.ca/au829/WeekendReport

[Screen shot of the minimal speed test - results are in a plain table]
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