Connected Devices

What Connected Devices Is

Connected Devices is the collective term for a suite of products and tests that, crucially, gives you a view into the ‘last mile’ of internet performance – the home. Our Device Agents, installed on home or office routers or in a mobile app, accurately measure connection health from your users’ premises or phone to the internet, in a way that other internet performance measures don’t.

A typical speed test runs from a browser over a user's home Wi-Fi to a router, then out to a test server on the internet. The problem with this kind of approach is that it introduces unknown variables into the results, like: was the test conducted over Wi-Fi in an area of the home with poor signal strength? Was it using an old browser or under-powered computer limiting the available speed? We test at the edge of the home network – at the router. This eliminates any in-home factors and ensures we measure the service provided to the home and nothing else.

Our Cisco Real Speed product goes a step further to test speed from both the router and your users’ personal devices, which, when viewed side-by-side, can help to identify whether any issues they’re experiencing stem from their personal device, their Wi-Fi, or your network.

How Connected Devices works

Agents

Device Agents perform the measurements and carry out data collection. This includes both active measurements (against test servers and real applications) and passive environmental measurements (such as CPU load and data usage). Agents may be provided in SDK (software development kit) form to both static hardware (e.g. routers and access points) or mobile hardware (e.g. iOS and Android).

Read about agents.

Test Servers

Test servers act as an endpoint for Device Agents to run measurements against. These test servers can be deployed “on-net”, which means inside of an ISP’s or enterprise’s private network, or “off-net”, which means outside the private network. No measurement data is stored on the test servers; they simply act as endpoints to generate and receive traffic.

Read about test servers.

Tests

Network Layer Tests

Tests to the on- and off-net servers typically measure internet speed, latency, packet loss and jitter. They run on the network layer and give an indication of general connection health. These tests will inform you if you’re getting what you’re paying for from your internet service provider (ISP). Network layer tests to on-net servers are free with a Device Agent license. As well as a license, network layer tests to off-net servers also require the purchase of units.

Real Application Tests

Device Agents also perform measurements against real applications and content providers. These include services for video streaming, gaming, content delivery networks (CDNs), social media, and video conferencing services. You can also test for DNS resolution, web browsing, voice over IP and traceroute via different network layers. As well as needing a license, these tests costs units to run.

Read about tests.

Read about Device Agent unit costs.

Test Triggers

Each test is triggered via an automated test schedule, or manually via an instant test. Scheduled tests allow you to understand the whole of a user’s or area’s internet performance across different times of day and even seasons. You can remotely trigger an instant test on a Device Agent for an immediate understanding of an end user’s connection performance.

Our test schedules can be configured to suit your requirements. Our latency test, meanwhile, operates continuously in the background, with typically 2000 samples taken every hour. This provides a very granular picture of latency performance and allows us to understand how latency varies when under load.

Read about test triggers.

Data Consumption

You access your test data either via our proprietary portal or via a number of APIs.

Read about our usage guides.

Read about our APIs.

Cisco Real Speed

As well as our customary speed tests that measure speed from your users’ routers to the internet, end users have the ability to self-diagnose issues on their premises using our proprietary Cisco Real Speed application, available via web iFrame, web app, and mobile app (the latter two needing connection to a nearby Device Agent). This two-step speed test measures speed to the internet from both the user’s router and their personal device. A large difference between the router speed and the personal device speed could indicate, for example, that the user has poor Wi-Fi signal strength.

Read about Cisco Real Speed.