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Accenture to acquire Ookla

newsroom.accenture.com

61–70 of 186 posts

Re: Accenture to acquire Ookla

#61
post #44

I am not sure why this old news is surfacing here today but I can give my 2 cents, since I sold speedchecker.com last year and were directly competing with Ookla. The main business is selling the data. You use Speedtest.net to troubleshoot your connection but metrics captured with the test alongside location data give telcos invaluable insights on where they should improve their networks. Telcos pay 6 figures annuall…

As someone who worked at a CDN for years, I imagine the code is the easiest technical part. Managing the infrastructure, network connectivity, load balancing, and capacity planning would be the harder parts, outside of the sales and marketing bits.

If you don’t get all of those parts right, you are going to end up measuring your own bandwidth rather than the client’s.

Re: Accenture to acquire Ookla

#62
post #44

I am not sure why this old news is surfacing here today but I can give my 2 cents, since I sold speedchecker.com last year and were directly competing with Ookla. The main business is selling the data. You use Speedtest.net to troubleshoot your connection but metrics captured with the test alongside location data give telcos invaluable insights on where they should improve their networks. Telcos pay 6 figures annuall…

How come ISPs aren't providing that data internally from observing their own traffic ?

Re: Accenture to acquire Ookla

#63
post #44

I am not sure why this old news is surfacing here today but I can give my 2 cents, since I sold speedchecker.com last year and were directly competing with Ookla. The main business is selling the data. You use Speedtest.net to troubleshoot your connection but metrics captured with the test alongside location data give telcos invaluable insights on where they should improve their networks. Telcos pay 6 figures annuall…

Why did you sell it?

Money without having to do more work > money that you have to keep working for

Re: Accenture to acquire Ookla

#65

that's nuts, unless I'm missing something, it doesn't seem like those products are that mind blowingly complex... wow. Makes we want to try building my own for the hell of it. Downdetector in fact just seems to be a website catalog with essentially a guestbook and hit counter...

The valuation must be outside of the tech. Are there relationships or contracts Accenture is getting access to?

Clearly. They are buying all the servers that are already imbedded in ISP networks.

Re: Accenture to acquire Ookla

#66
post #55
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The partner network of Speedtest is also impressive. I don't know how many speed tests they need to handle in parallel, but usually it's always enough to do speed tests up to 5-10 Gbit/s. With more and more fiber connections also latency becomes very relevant. Otherwise the tests would be meaningless. Speedtest manages to measure less than 1ms latency on my fiber connection.

Once you have a good amount of users testing, its not that difficult to get free servers from the ISPs. The secret is that on-net servers show testers better performance than off-net so every ISP wants to contribute the speed test server. If they dont do it they are shooting themselves in the foot by routing their traffic to competitor networks and getting test results behind their peers. Whats even worst then your c…

Sure, but it's still a huge effort to set up all those partnerships and keep them alive. ISPs are often traditional and slow moving companies, it probably takes a lot of work to get those servers in place at the right locations.

Re: Accenture to acquire Ookla

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they are not complex. They do have a network effect though. If you go to your local ISP and say “hey, my 500mbps plan is only doing 100mbps on Speedtest.net”, they’ll “fix it” (usually by working with Ookla to put an edge endpoint on their network) If you tell the “hey frankyspeeddetect.com isn’t doing my 500mbps” they’ll tell you to it’s an issue with that random website. ISPs and services reach out to Ook…

http://speed.cloudflare.com is a bit harder to argue with though.

I had not heard of http://speed.cloudflare.com either. I just tried it and I did not get accurate numbers. wifiman.com, from Ubiquiti/Unifi team does provide more accurate numbers. fast.com numbers are pretty accurate as well.

Re: Accenture to acquire Ookla

#69
post #62
post #44

I am not sure why this old news is surfacing here today but I can give my 2 cents, since I sold speedchecker.com last year and were directly competing with Ookla. The main business is selling the data. You use Speedtest.net to troubleshoot your connection but metrics captured with the test alongside location data give telcos invaluable insights on where they should improve their networks. Telcos pay 6 figures annuall…

How come ISPs aren't providing that data internally from observing their own traffic ?

I'm sure they do, but data about the speeds of other ISPs is also valuable.

Re: Accenture to acquire Ookla

#70
post #17

that's nuts, unless I'm missing something, it doesn't seem like those products are that mind blowingly complex... wow. Makes we want to try building my own for the hell of it. Downdetector in fact just seems to be a website catalog with essentially a guestbook and hit counter...

the best part is Downdetector is inaccurate as hell - if AWS is genuinely down, folks get curious and search other providers, causing Downdetector to mark them as down too

Just searching surely does not mark them as down?
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