All,
Am I the last to find out? When the new BT performance tester came out I was told by my ISP (to be 'ex' tomorrow) that the new tester refused the speedtest@speedtest_domain login and would "do all that on its own".
There are two pdf handbooks for the new tester. Here's the end-user version at an Entanet link:
http://www.enta.net/fileadmin/entanet/PDF_s/pt_end_user_handbook_issue1.pdfAfter going through the single test we all know, the document says
"As the tests carried out by the BT Performance Tester covers the BT Wholesale network, your Service Provider?s network and the Internet, the results can be influenced by a number of factors."
It then lists everything from your keyboard through your ISP, across the Internet and back to BT Wholesale and says
"We strongly recommend that all results are discussed with your Service Provider."
My ISP wasn't completely wrong, though. I've got a copy of the "BT Performance Tester -- Service Provider Handbook" and it apparently supports three tests (can I upload this?):
- The plain vanilla test like all the others ('end user' -- what we're left with now)
- some test to bt_test@startup_domain (the earliest tester we saw)
- some test to speedtest@speedtest_domain (what we had until November)
The last two are apparently not available except for "assured rate users", so we've lost our way to separate BT performance from ISP performance.
Ay Caramba!
Richard