Tag Archives: Ookla

Weekly output: Speedtest rankings, Starship test launch, new T-Mobile plans, social-media propaganda in Sudan

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On Saturday I’m traveling someplace new to me–Rio de Janeiro, where Web Summit is hosting a second annual edition of its conference. My part of it will be interviewing 1Password CEO Jeff Shiner and Signal president Meredith Whittaker; last week, I invited Patreon readers to suggest questions for each of those sessions.

4/17/2023: In Speed Showdown, T-Mobile Leads the Pack, and Not Just in 5G, PCMag

Seeing T-Mobile vault to the head of network-comparison tests like this makes me feel old, because I remember when one of the primary ancestors of that carrier did business as VoiceStream and was nobody’s idea of a threat to AT&T and Verizon.

Screenshot of the PCMag post as seen in Safari for iPadOS; the illustration is a photo showing Starhip ascending from the pad, leaning slightly to the left.4/20/2023: SpaceX’s Starship Launches Before Exploding 24 Miles Up, PCMag

I once thought I would be able to write this story in early 2022, but I should have given Elon Musk’s optimistic words a much more skeptical hearing. And then the day finally arrived and the giant rocket didn’t make it to staging. I described that as a successful failure, in the sense that SpaceX should now have a wealth of flight data about Starship’s performance, but I didn’t know then that Starship had pulverized part of its launch pad. Or that SpaceX had conducted Starship’s static-fire test in February at only half of the first stage’s thrust.

4/20/2023: T-Mobile Makes a Bid for Hardcore Hotspot Users With New ‘Go5G’ Plans, PCMag

T-Mobile showed up in my coverage again when the carrier introduced two new plans that aren’t named “Magenta” and effectively bracket the previous top-of-the-line Magenta Max plan.

4/23/2023: The war of social media, Al Araby

This Arabic-language news channel had me on to talk about the dueling social-media propaganda campaigns unfolding from both sides of the civil war in Sudan–both of which seem to involve a great deal of deception that benefits from Twitter’s recent “meh” approach to disinformation. I leaned heavily on reports from the Sudanese news site Beam Reports and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Lab.

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The boring art of testing hotspot bandwidth and battery life

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I’m nearing the finish line (I hope) of an overdue update to the Wirecutter guide to WiFi hotspots. The research for that had me repeatedly subjecting an array of loaner hotspots from all four nationwide wireless carriers to tests of the two core metrics of bandwidth and battery life.

It hasn’t exactly been my most exciting work.

For bandwidth testing, I’ve continued to rely on Ookla’s Speedtest.net Web, Android and iOS apps to clock the download speeds, upload speeds and ping times each hotspot has served up. This is pretty much an industry-standard benchmark, and these apps are simple enough to run.

But getting data out of them is another thing:

  • The iOS app creates a .csv file you can open in any spreadsheet app that includes every relevant bit of data–date and time, GPS-derived location, WiFi network name, download/upload/ping measurements, shareable public link–and attaches it to an e-mail message.
  • The Android app also generates a .csv file–except that choosing to have it saved to your Google Drive leaves you with a .eml mail-attachment file. You have to e-mail it to yourself to get a usable .csv, at which point you discover that this export doesn’t include the name of the wireless network.
  • The Web app’s “Export” button yields a third type of .csv file, one without a record of the WiFi network name, your location, or a shareable link.
  • No, the option to create a Speedtest account won’t help–because you can’t log into that from the mobile apps.

Ookla is owned by PCMag publisher Ziff Davis, but that has yet to result in any corporate pressure to make exporting measurements less janky for the hardworking journalists at that and other Ziff tech media properties.

Testing hotspot battery life only requires recording the times you started and ended each trial. But because these things often run for 12 hours or more, it’s not realistic to tether a laptop to a hotspot and keep working nonstop until the hotspot battery expires and the connection drops.

To ensure my laptop would be keeping each hotspot working full time, I opened a page to NASA’s live YouTube channel. Beyond running up the social-media metrics for one of my favorite four-letter government agencies, keeping the browser on a single live channel avoids the risk of YouTube’s recommendations sending me off to some nutcase conspiracy hub.

Because I’m not always that smart, I didn’t think to check my laptop’s ability to log a wireless connection going offline until after I’d spent an hour and change watching one hotspot linger at 1% of a charge.

As a helpful StackExchange thread pointed out, that logged data awaits inside Windows. Type “Event Viewer” in the taskbar search, open that app, select “Applications and Services Logs” in the left-hand pane, double-click the center pane’s “Microsoft,” “Windows,” “UniversalTelemetryClient,” and “Operational” entries in succession, then select “Filter Current Log…” in the right-hand pane. Type “55” in the resulting dialog’s Event ID field, hit “OK” and you’ll see a series of entries.

Assuming you check this right after seeing that the laptop went offline, opening the most recent should reveal a properties field consisting of “Is the Internet available: false,” with the time corresponding to when the hotspot died.

Since I don’t have a Mac laptop, I’m not sure how you’d do this on one. A different StackExchange thread suggests a Terminal command, but that doesn’t work on my iMac–maybe because this aging desktop isn’t running the latest macOS edition. It would be ironic if you have to hit the command line on a Mac to perform a task that Windows lets you accomplish inside a graphical user interface–but the Windows Event Viewer app is mighty ugly itself, and neither operating system covers itself in glory in this aspect.