One of Sun Tzu's lesser known works is his “The Art of War” follow-up, “The Art of Traceroute”.
Of course, that's a joke, and it doesn't actually exist. I can and will have a good go at writing an equivalent in this article though!
For the international readers, the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) is a Consumer Protection focused regulatory body at the level of Federal Government in Australia. In 2018, they began publishing reports related to comparing performance between various Retail Service Providers (or ISPs) on the nbn (National Broadband Network) and other fixed-line customer access networks in Australia. The ACCC has contracted SamKnows (owned by Cisco) to orchestrate the testing and collection of data that is used to produce these reports, SamKnows performs these tests by selectively distributing a testing device to Australian internet users on an opt-in basis and having them plug the device into their local network at home.
Within Australia these reports have a questionable reputation at best amongst the Network Engineering community, we'll explore why this is so in this post.
In this article we'll cover a bit about what kind of performance you can expect from more traditional TCP Congestion Control methods, and among other things why it's becoming increasingly common to hear phrases such as “but it works better over my VPN”.
Providing good support to a customer is difficult for a number of reasons, but the big three in my opinion are the following…