By Claus Hetting, Wi-Fi NOW CEO & Chairman
Verifying your home broadband speed is important for both consumers and service providers and now home broadband solution provider SoftAtHome is including speed tests as part of its ‘Eyes’ON‘ analytics solution. The speed test feature has already been deployed as part of Orange France’s Livebox 7 offering. SoftAtHome says the feature helps operators optimise the use of network resources.
Speed is still the most important metric relating to a broadband service and now Orange France’s customers can run their own super fast speed test on their ‘Orange et moi’ app. The speed test is part of SoftAtHome’s ‘Eyes’On’ analytics solution, which today is available to Orange France’s broadband customers together with the Livebox 7 gateway and fibre-based service.
“The speed test returns an accurate result in less than a second, which means it uses very few network resources and is much, much faster and more efficient than commonly used speed tests on the Internet. Customers can run the test to verify that they’re getting the speed promised by the operator, and the operator’s customer care staff can run the test remotely for diagnostics,” says Quentin Lebeau, Product Marketing Manager at SoftAtHome.
In addition to being launched at Orange France, SoftAtHome says the speed test is also being used by various other SoftAtHome operator clients across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Quentin Lebeau says the test is used extensively by operators for insights into network performance and pro-active maintenance in order ensure service reliability or for testing for example in connection with core network upgrades. It is possible to run the test between the core network and CPE or between the core network and a Wi-Fi device, he says.
There is also a distinct benefit that comes as a result of not using a public testing service such as Ookla. “When you test via Ookla the test data is owned by the test provider and feeds public rankings. When used in case of problem suspicion, which is often the case, the result will unfairly drive down the rank of a service. With an operator-specific speed test, the results are owned by the operator and have no impact on public rankings,” Quentin Lebeau says.
The Wi-Fi 6E-capable Livebox 7 available from Orange France is powered by SoftAtHome and was released late last year (read more here). The box supports consumer-grade services of up to 5 Gbps and business services of up to 8 Gbps. The Livebox 7 is probably the world’s most eco-friendly home broadband gateway featuring intelligent power management functionality for reduced power consumption and now also highly efficient speed tests.
/Claus.
