scte PRESENTS
Testing and Measurement Panel 2: NETWORK ACTIVATION TEST & MEASUREMENT Network Activation and the Speed Test
The panel acknowledged that speed tests are also messy in practice.
In practice, that can mean two sets of proof: formal reporting and stats to claim vouchers, and a basic reassurance test before the engineer leaves: “hopefully your engineer does a nice speed test”. That “speed test” went on to dominate the first part of the discussion, with a debate over whether it’s the right metric or simply the only one the customer will recognise.
The Network Activation panel had a deceptively simple problem to solve: at the point of install, what exactly are you proving – and to whom?
Gavin McGowan, MD, Frame Communications noted that results depend
heavily on the test server location (“on- net” versus “off-net”), and that customers repeatedly confuse Wi-Fi performance with broadband access. You can’t ignore speed tests, he argued, but you can improve how you do them: “We look at it at layer two, layer three, layer four, and… we’d recommend… a proper TCP test… People use speed tests. You can’t ignore it.” Latency and “responsiveness” then emerged as the next battleground, but again with caveats about what operators can control. Paddison highlighted a real-world reality: gamers care about the Fortnite or Activision server, not just the access link – “you’re only in charge of it until you hand it over”. Whitehead pointed to Comcast as the best example of an operator working end-to-end, not just access-only: “What Comcast have done is they’ve worked with the application providers to specifically mark packets… that marking is honoured through the access infrastructure… through the backbone network… and then hopefully all the way back to the gaming server…
Moderator James Saunby reminded us of what government agency Building Digital UK (BDUK) was looking for:
Harmonic’s David Whitehead argued speed tests are a blunt instrument: “You don’t need anything over 100 megabits downstream…
minimum gigabit download, minimum 200Mbps upload, latency targets and further requirements “at busy hour”. For any operator taking public funding, he said, that means measurements are no longer optional. But the panel questioned whether those were the same measures understood by customers.
It’s all about responsiveness… and that is the key metric.” The challenge, others suggested, is that speed is what’s marketed – and what’s sold becomes the customer’s yardstick. As audience member Ian Nock put it: “If it’s not important, don’t sell it. That’s all you sell right now. Customers look at what you sell, and they expect exactly what you sell, which means if you sell gig, you need a gig 24 hours a day whenever they test it, and that’s why they’re testing it.”
“There’s two people you need to satisfy… There’s His Majesty’s Government… and then there’s the consumer who is now paying the money,” said
INCA CEO Paddy Paddison.
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MARCH 2026 Volume 48 No.1
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