To whom it may concern,

I write today to petition that Vodafone India be removed as your Speedtest partner from Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai.

I'm running an ISP here in India as well as casually supporting people on other providers, helping them diagnose problems with their Internet connections and generally contributing to the discussions on local forums.

One of the things I've been noticing lately is that ALL of Vodafone's servers have been performing abysmally with extremely high pings (300+ms) and very unfavourable results, irrespective of which provider I am using (or which provider the people I have been discussing the same with) - and this is leading to an increase in support requests, not just for me, but for other providers as well, considering that speedtest.net is kind of a "de-facto" performance measuring device.

We are sure that it is not a problem with my Internet connection - or anyone else' connection, considering that I am able to achieve pings of 2-3ms to Google's network and in the 3-7ms range to individual servers on other ISP networks in the city: I *should* be able to achieve pings of well under 10ms to Vodafone Mumbai, but, it is rare for me to achieve under 40ms - this despite my connection and even proximity to the physical server.

I experience no such issues with Airtel or Tata's browser-based speed tests (which are not Ookla's but I digress, they still give me handsome ping times under 10ms). Furthermore, I am usually able to achieve better results to Hughes server in Delhi than to any of Vodafone's servers in any part of India, including Mumbai.

Given that the tests are coming from a range of ISPs on various technologies with differing configurations and in different parts of the country, we can only really come to the conclusion that it is an issue Vodafone's servers not being optimally configured (or possibly the hardware they are running these tests on is inadequate) and it is with this that I urge Ookla to reconsider Vodafone India as it's primary hosts here.

Here are 2 recent discussions with regards to the same:
http://broadbandforum.in/beam-fiber-broadband/75954-horrible-pings-after...
http://broadbandforum.in/airtel-broadband/76137-high-ping-after-migratin...

Here are tests conducted on a 10mbit/s connection whilst writing this message:
Vodafone Mumbai: http://www.speedtest.net/result/1758755855.png (I am physically about 3km from this server, and can ping Google in a neighbouring facility in around 2-3ms as stated earlier)
Vodafone Delhi: http://www.speedtest.net/result/1758758068.png
Vodafone Chennai: http://www.speedtest.net/result/1758759361.png

Hughes Delhi: http://www.speedtest.net/result/1758765848.png
Aircel Kochi: http://www.speedtest.net/result/1758764885.png

Outside India:
Dubai: http://www.speedtest.net/result/1758766880.png
Colombo: http://www.speedtest.net/result/1758768411.png
Perth: http://www.speedtest.net/result/1758769812.png
Limerick: http://www.speedtest.net/result/1758773186.png
Bonneville, France: http://www.speedtest.net/result/1758774444.png
Auckland: http://www.speedtest.net/result/1758771183.png

To stress just how bad Vodafone is being at the moment, if I can get better performance from a server in Auckland compared to one in Mumbai, there is something seriously wrong with the Mumbai server.

A traceroute reveals a significant jump in pingtimes between my upstream (Airtel) and Vodafone's network, but as per the forum links posted earlier, the same seems to be true from other ISPs as well (including Tata). Whether this is due to insufficient peering or simple lack of capacity, it seems that Vodafone lacks the ability to maintain these servers for Ookla and for the sake of keeping valid results, Ookla should seriously reconsider Vodafone's position.

And just to be sure that it's not a time of day thing, I am running all of these tests off-peak (4.30am to 5am India time) - http://www.speedtest.net/result/1758780716.png - but I think that these results speak for themselves.

Please, for the sake of Internet users in India, heed my pleas!

Regards

Mathew Carley