5G: Dead everywhere, freely challenges the analysis method adopted by ARCEP

A recent ARCEP study on 5G deployment in France highlights the good performance of the Orange, as well as the (major) weaknesses of the Free. The operator responded A series of tweets He explains that the method used by ARCEP is not appropriate and does not allow to know the actual performance of its 5G network: ” The ARCEP survey shows strong differences in flow rates between operators. These imbalances are the result of a measurement protocol. Download speeds are very different from those of Speedest, RNCMobile and NPerf, as they actually are in use. .

Two rooms, two atmospheres …

Its network for free “Optimized for use with multiple links (multitread)“What is the most used system on the Internet?”In practice, services such as Wetransfer, iCloud, Netflix or YouTube and almost all websites use 2 to 200 TCP connections.Can we read the measurement protocol for ARCEP survey when it is based on monothread? So it would not be appropriate according to free.

ARCEP, for its part, reacted quickly by sharing a press release justifying its choice to get as close as possible to the user experience:

⁇ARCEP has long chosen to measure the quality of mobile service, technically, as closely as possible to the user experience. This is why ARCEP has chosen for many years to perform “single-connection” speed tests, which involves opening and using a single-connection stream between the downloaded file and the hosted mobile and server. It is now widely used on the Internet. Although many applications are open on mobile, in practice, in most cases, only one flow is used at a given time. At this point, this protocol looks closer to the client application and helps to express the operator’s network optimization efforts in this direction. It is also possible to perform “multi-connection” tests, which further highlight the “maximum capacity” of the network in terms of performance. This is done in many grocercing applications, and may explain the differences between streams measured by ARCEP and the result of such applications..