SamKnows, a company that measures internet performance with hardware probes, posts about broadband latency, DNS performance, and its measurement work with regulators.
HN commenters describe it as a real analytics company working with governments and ISPs, and debate its privacy practices and its DNS-over-HTTPS claims.
SamKnows | Systems Administrator | Onsite | London, United Kingdom | https://samknows.com/careers/sysadmin
SamKnows is the global leader in internet performance measurement. We’ve been collecting data since 2008 on all manner of metrics, from how good Netflix performance is to figuring out why Fortnite isn’t working for gamers. Our infrastructure spans six continents and consists of more than 700 servers as well as third party edge infrastructure. The majority of these servers are bare metal ‘test servers’, which act as endpoints for speed tests and other measurement traffic. These have very high bandwidth - sometimes 100Gbit/s! Our broader infrastructure uses a mixture of bare metal (primarily for our very large database servers) and cloud-hosted services.
Role requirements:
- Strong Linux server administration background (preferably CentOS / Redhat)
- Shell scripting knowledge
- Experience with administering MySQL servers
- Knowledge of Puppet or a similar automation tool is highly beneficial
- Experience of server monitoring tools, such as Nagios
- A good understanding of DNS
- Experience in configuring Apache and Nginx
- A willingness to be part of on-call rota one week in three
- Experience with Github is beneficial
SamKnows is working with governments, ISPs, consumers and academics worldwide to build the definitive global internet performance measurement platform. With over 100,000 hardware measurement probes distributed across 35 countries, and even more mobile app installations, we provide an accurate analysis of end-to-end internet performance.
If you love big data, machine learning, and want to work in a fast-paced environment while contributing to the greater good, SamKnows could just be what you’re looking for.
We have an office right by the Tate Modern in London and are about to open two more offices in Sao Paulo and Philadelphia.
We are hiring for the following roles:
* iOS Developer
* Android Developer
* Senior Software Engineer (Machine Learning)
* Senior Software Engineer (PHP Backend)
* Senior Software Engineer (Data)
More details can be found here: https://www.samknows.com/company/careers
Contact us with any queries: careers@samknows.com
Get one of samknows boxes[1] to measure your broadband. It is like a bandwidth test but mainly measures when you are not using your home network, i.e., it senses for traffic before making measurements. You'll be able to see a historic graph of the available bandwidth, average RTT (to some popular sites) and losses (if any), DNS response times, etc.
They run some of the above tests once every hour. The good thing with this initiative is it attempts to build an IETF standard [2] that can be incorporated by all ISPs to make sure that their deployed network is performant.
[1] http://www.samknows.com/broadband/
[2] https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/lmap/
The $35 includes most calls (all local and ten most-called/chosen national and mobile numbers are free on my package from the last three providers) and line rental. Add another $15 for TV licence.
The competition here is from Local Loop Unbundling [1], where the non-ISP part of BT, BT Openreach, works on the exchanges and cabinets. Rollout stats [2], compare Scotland and London for the rural/city development. There's up to 9 choices in London, I would expect iPlayer would work on all of them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_the_United_Kingdom#Unbundled_local_loop
https://www.samknows.com/broadband/statistics/regional
What do you mean, they clearly spell out how little they collect, in their privacy policy:
> The amount of personally identifiable information stored by SamKnows is limited to; name, email, and address. All metadata and personally identifiable information is both encrypted at rest and in transit on SamKnows servers. It is never stored or transmitted to or from the test agent
See? Nothing to worry about, just your name, email and address. Very little that could actually pinpoint who you are or where you are.
Ref: https://samknows.com/blog/testing-principles
DNS lookups for CDNs will return a different (local) IP for clients in different regions. The proper way to handle this is using EDNS Client Subnet, which is what Google DOH does. CloudFlare DOH doesn't support this, but instead handles this by making the DNS request from a server near to the end user. This is only roughly accurate, and can't for example point a user's request to their ISP's on-prem edge cache:
https://samknows.com/blog/dns-over-https-performance