MIIT Publicizes Draft of Fixed Broadband Access Rate Testing Methods
Morning news on April 16, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) recently publicized the draft for approval (full text) of the communication industry standard "Fixed Broadband Access Rate Testing Methods".
It is understood that this communication industry standard was proposed and managed by the China Communications Standards Association, and jointly drafted by the MIIT Telecommunications Research Institute, China Telecom (microblog), China Unicom (microblog), and China Mobile (microblog).
The draft specifies that the network includes the access network, metropolitan area network, backbone network, and the Internet. The fixed broadband access rate refers to the information transmission rate on the link from the broadband service access point BRAS of the broadband access service provider to the user terminal, generally measured in kbit/s or Mbit/s. Since the access network is only one component of the network, the broadband access rate is not equivalent to the actual rate experienced by users when using network services (such as watching videos, downloading files, etc.), i.e., the rate between the user terminal and the service server.
The fixed broadband access rate test mainly targets the network downlink direction, i.e., from the network side to the user side. The testing method for the uplink direction is pending further research.
The draft standard also sets requirements for user terminal test configuration, requiring that the user terminal CPU main frequency be at least 1 GHz; memory at least 1 GByte; operating system Windows XP or above; browser Internet Explorer 6.0 or above. Network-related applications should be closed, such as download tools like Thunder, eMule, and BitSpirit, online video playback applications like Youku, Tudou, and PPLive, file transfers using instant messaging tools like QQ, MSN, and Fetion, as well as updates and online upgrades of the operating system and various applications. Other terminals using the same broadband access service in the home environment should also be prevented from running the above applications.
The user terminal should be connected to the network via a wired connection, not using WLAN access for rate testing. Other applications occupying terminal resources should be closed to prevent excessive CPU utilization and memory utilization from affecting test results.
Regarding test data processing, the draft recommends including various household fixed broadband subscription rates; sampling points should be distributed across 31 provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities directly under the central government; user sampling data should cover all prefecture-level cities in each province and autonomous region and all districts and counties in each municipality directly under the central government; for each broadband rate in each province, autonomous region, and municipality, no less than 3‰ of users should be selected as data samples; test data sampling time should cover various typical time periods of each day; every 3 months is used as one statistical cycle.