The statistical data is based on all the users that run
http://www.speedtest.net/ .
According to your explanation, if one were to run speed-test over and over, they should begin to get worse results, as the "powerboost" wouldn't be available [because they've been maxing out their bandwidth in previous minutes]. Is this correct?
I'm not doubting you. Just wondering if we can test this somehow, because there's a lot of comprehensive data that I hope we can learn from there (
http://explorer.netindex.com/maps).
Speedtest (and other similar sites) are primarily marketing tools. They are indeed applicable if somebody does non-p2p things like:
- streaming video/audio
- downloading/uploading files
- multiplayer gaming on a centralized server
If you really want to advance Bitcoin (or other peer-2-peer technologies) you'll have to learn to filter the marketing misinformation and simplifications.
In particular, I understand that speedtest was explicitly designed using Flash application such that the user experience precludes you from triggering out of powerboost. It intentionally slows down your interaction by displaying complex screens and prompting you to inform others about your results. It makes it really hard to reliably repeat the test until stable results are achieved.
The only true peer-2-peer results that I have ever seen were collected using Bittorrent. In the past I used to do a lot of torrenting, now I just occasionally help people with their problems.
The true information about the performance of consumer broadband is extremely proprietary. Even the ISP's employees don't have access to the detailed technical information. There are two reasons:
- obvious one: it is a source of competitive advantage and allows them to play various games with customers and competitors
- non-obvious one: modern high-performance hardware-accelerated routers used by ISPs are actually layer-3 switches that are dynamically reprogrammable per packet flow. This is rather fiendishly complicated technology, even the professional networking engineers are surprised by their limitations
See for yourself: lookup on the web discussions about Cisco IOS commands e.g. "show ip cache flow" or "show ip cef" and see when you start losing the plot.
I've recently moved and I'm no longer directly involved in infrastructure details. But from few years ago I remember having a discussion with some students using Bittorrent and other P2P tools. Quite common observation was that overall stable bandwidth can be significantly increased by using a SOCKS proxy server, or trivial (non-encrypting) VPN connection (PPTP, L2TP, etc.) to a machine in some data center or even a dorm room. The consumer ISP then sees only a single pair of packet flows which they can handle more efficiently on their equipment.