Networking while working from home VPN split tunnel, OneDrive download speed, and buffer bloat

Microsoft

We published an update for https://connectivity.office.com today which adds a new test for OneDrive download speed and for buffer bloat. VPN split tunnel testing was previously added as described here. These support common networking tests for Office 365 users working from home.

 

1) OneDrive download speed - this shows the megabytes per second available to the user from the OneDrive and SharePoint service front door. MBps (Megabytes per second) is approximately 1/10 of Mbps (Megabits per second) which you are usually quoted from an ISP so if you have 100Mbps from your ISP, you should expect 10MBps from this test. A 10MBps measurement supports downloading a 10Mb Word document in 1 second. This test involves downloading 15Mb from the OneDrive service front door.

 

2) Buffer bloat - this shows a measurement of the increased latency due to congestion in your home router when the ISP bandwidth is full. In this situation such as a large download consumer routers will buffer packets instead of putting them on the Internet. The assumption is that the delay will be short and the packet will be sent soon. Since RAM is cheap and buffers can be large, the delay in sending the packet can be several seconds on a highly congested line. In this situation a better option would be to fail the send which would notify the client application that bandwidth is low. Buffer bloat measures the milliseconds that a packet is in the router buffer. If you have very large numbers then you might consider searching for a router which has mechanisms for coping with this scenario. 

 

Let us know how you go with these.

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