"if the average is good, then the beam can not possibly be over sold"
But there may be other reasons for speed issues -- in 2017 there were problems with Bean 68 and the speed was pretty bad for a while and didn't get better until the engineers fixed whatever the issue was.
maratsade wrote:"if the average is good, then the beam can not possibly be over sold"
But there may be other reasons for speed issues -- in 2017 there were problems with Bean 68 and the speed was pretty bad for a while and didn't get better until the engineers fixed whatever the issue was.
Yes, absolutely. When there was that problem, presumably all recent tests run when the problem existed would have been bad and the recent average would be low.
Just because the recent average is bad does not imply the beam is oversold. But if the average of recent tests is good, then how can anyone say the beam is experiencing poor performance because it is oversold?
If I have repeated bad test results recently, but the average of recent tests is good as shown in the DB, then I think the following are implied:
I think this can be a useful way to say beam X is *not* oversold, and appears to be running good recently. It is not a demonstration that beam X is oversold. It also lets us know approximately how we are doing compared to others in our area. This kind of test does not offer proof the beam is oversold -- it simply provides evidence it is not.
"I can run 50 tests when everyone else is asleep so as to make an oversold beam look good :-)"
LOL.
[Sorry, deleted something by mistake -- I had asked if there is evidence that an oversold beam functions poorly. Since we don't know what beams are oversold, if any, we can't really test, so all of this seems to be just speculation).
EDIT: other reasons for poor performance could be issues with specific servers (such as web acceleration), and gateway issues. Performance issues were present in several beams towards the beginning of Gen 5, and the beams were not even close to oversold. Congestion happens very easily too, especially at prime time, and it doesn't take that many people to clog the beam. If memory serves, without optimisation, clogging happens with just 64 subscribers using the system at the same time. I imagine optimisation raises this number, but since the amount of data to go around is not all that much, the quality can deteriorate pretty quickly, especially when those 64 or so people are all trying to stream.
maratsade wrote:Is there evidence that an oversold beam always functions poorly?
Of course not. But it is unlikely that an oversold beam will have an *average of many* recent tests above 25Mbps and therefore probable that the beam is not oversold, and so it looks to me to be evidence the beam is not oversold.
Of course, I laugh pretty hard at the idea of trying to figure out when I can run 50 tests when everyone else is asleep so as to make an oversold beam look good :-)
Maybe we can coin a term for it -- "salting a beam" haha
