Woody Walton

There has been a lot of talk in various places lately about BPOS and its impending successor, Office 365.  I have been following BPOS closely for a few years and try to keep abreast of the latest information relevant to partners.  As with many large companies, Microsoft, has a tendency to inadvertently hide resources within the sprawl of its corporate website (Microsoft.com is one of the world’s largest websites you know). I was surprised to find reference in the past week of a speed test URL that checks connectivity with our corporate datacenters that run BPOS and soon to be Office 365!  This is awesome!  What a great tool to help determine if a customer needs additional bandwidth (even more critical with online services).

The Resource:

HTTP://SPEEDTEST.MICROSOFTONLINE.COM

To quote the details section of the speed test tool:

This tool helps you understand the quality of the Internet connection between your environment and Microsoft Online Services. It does not measure your environment compatibility with Microsoft Online Services. The tool performs three tests:

• Speed: This test measures your actual download and upload speeds, quality of data, and TCP efficiency. It uses TCP/20000 for download testing and TCP/20001 for upload testing.
• Route: This test validates your connection quality, including packet loss, latency, round trip, and ISP peering points. It uses Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP).
• Capacity: This test measures your potential maximum download and upload speeds. It uses UDP/8090.

Once all three tests are complete a summary is given with some additional hyperlinks and options as to how you might view the data.

A screen shot of the summary of my sample test is below; It provides some basic assessment information regarding QOS and speed/capacity:

Advanced Stats are below:

Remember this is against Microsoft’s Data Centers so this is a much better reflection of how good the connectivity is to BPOS or Office 365.  When we take a look at the route data we can learn a lot.  I have included a few screen shots below of some of the tabs on the route report.  Notice I have a lot of hops, which the report indicates as a warning:

When I examined the capacity report I noticed the uploads were capped at ~500 Kbps.

I would recommend running this report several times through a week to get a running average as my test reports varied to a significant degree, although not wildly.

Lastly you can have this report output in a little better format for sharing with a customer by selecting the detailed analysis links throughout the report.  I would not state they are “more detailed” per se, but they make a good printing view.

I hope this is useful to your BPOS sales efforts and deployment planning.  Remember to look out for my blog entry on determining customer network requirements for BPOS!

Until next time,

Woody