pitter patter on the keyboard

UPDATE CoreNetworks.net has responded and reacted to my criticisms below. Please read the comments on this article to see our exchange.

It has been 30 days since I first told you about CoreNetworks’ unfortunate bandwidth test file placement, which they have still not bothered to correct. Against my better judgement I decided to give them a second chance this morning when, upon configuring my order for 100mbit/s port (+$10) and 3300GB (+$55) add-on I was surprised with this error:

NOTICE: You cannot select 3300 GB transfer and 100Mbps transfer. Your selection has been updated.

Well, why not? That doesn’t seem to make much sense. Since they called the 100 meg port “transfer” and the amount of bandwidth “transfer” as well I assumed some dolt that didn’t know what he was doing was behind this glitch in the order process. So I called.

“3300GB is by definition an unlimited 10mbps port”

In the same breath their rep told me:

• I couldn’t get more than the 2000GB package plus per-GB overages on 100mbit/s despite the fact that they could “technically” give 3300GB to 10mbps port users
  • I guess we are to assume their network is so poorly constructed the extra TB at 100mbit/s would crush them
• If you went with the 10mbps port and the $55 1.3T add-on (3300GB package) the only way to get your money’s worth would be to saturate the connection 100%, 24/7, all month long.
• If 3300GB is synonymous with an unlimited 10mbps port we’re working in terms of egress traffic only

Let’s verify the math to make sure I’m not jumping to any conclusions:

Seconds in a month: 2629743.83
Bits in 3300GB: 28346784153600
Bits per second: 10779294.9
Mbits per second: 10.2799367 (binary) 10.7792949 (decimal)

The fact is no matter how you slice your megabits they are selling you more transit than you can possibly use on a 10mbit/s port. Even if we start with a decimal gigabyte you would have to transmit at 39Kbit/s faster than your port speed all month long just to reach your quota.

It’s not just false advertising. It’s a scam.

Made worse by the fact that their FAQ misconstrues the truth:

What type of connection will I have?
This depends on the type of connection you choose. All servers are connected to 10Mbps switch ports (100Mbps ports are available for certain plans). You are able to select flat-rate capped bandwidth on a per-Mbps basis, or you could opt for burstable metered bandwidth. We make both options available to help you find exactly what you’re looking for. You can upgrade from a 10Mbps port to a 100Mbps port for an added $10/month. This does not change your allowed data transfer amount, and care should be taken to avoid unexpected overages if you decide on this option.

It’s also interesting to note that “flat-rate capped bandwidth on a per-Mbps basis” no longer seems to be available (it was when I was with them aeons ago).

Despite all the nice things I’ve said about their support, their level of sloppiness and shadiness makes CoreNetworks.net inadequate for serious hosting.

I came across this script while looking for something that would let me quickly determine a user’s download speed. I’ve improved upon it by detecting latency (and HTTP header overhead) then subtracting it from the total time of the bulk download to yield more accurate results.

You must supply a large file to download, the larger the more accurate (or at least averaged) the reading. I created mine like so:

$ dd if=/dev/urandom of=./random.img bs=1M count=20

Enjoy:

<?php

$data_file = "random.img";    // $data_file should be some generic binary file - this script was tested with a 3 MB zip file of some Dilbert comic strips. The file should be sufficiently large so that the latency from the initial HTTP request itself does not skew the results by much.
$filesize = filesize($data_file);
$divisor = 1024; //set this to 1000 instead of 1024 if you want true KB and MB, rather than mis-labeled KiB and MiB that we are most used to seeing...
if(isset($_GET['latency']))
{
	print('L');
	exit(0);
}
elseif(isset($_GET['ajax'])){
    // if it's an ajax call we just read and print the binary file's contents...
    $fd = fopen ($data_file, 'r');
    $contents = fread ($fd, $filesize);
    ob_start(print $contents);
    ob_end_flush();
    fclose ($fd);
    exit(0);
}
else{
    // if this visit is not an AJAX request we display the page itself...
?><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
<title>Bandwidth Test</title>

<script type="text/javascript">
//<!--
var time;
var starttime;
var latency_starttime;
var endtime;
var downloadtime;
var kbps;
var ksec;
var mbps;
var msec;
var ajax_run = new XMLHttpRequest();
function addCommas(nStr){
    nStr += '';
    x = nStr.split('.');
    x1 = x[0];
    x2 = x.length > 1 ? '.' + x[1] : '';
    var rgx = /(\d+)(\d{3})/;
    while (rgx.test(x1)) {
        x1 = x1.replace(rgx, '$1' + ',' + '$2');
    }
    return x1 + x2;
}
function ajax_bandwidth_test(){
    cancel_any_pending_ajax();
    disable_table();
    send_ajax_call();
}
function cancel_any_pending_ajax(){
    if(ajax_run.readyState){
        if (ajax_run.readyState != 0 && ajax_run.readyState != 4){
            ajax_run.abort();
        }
    }
}
function disable_table(){
    var action_row = document.getElementById('action_row');
    var spans = action_row.getElementsByTagName('span');
    var link = action_row.getElementsByTagName('a')[0];
    link.style.zIndex = -1;
    if (spans.length>1){
        spans[1].className = 'disabled';
        spans[2].className = 'disabled';
    }
    var status_box = document.getElementById('status');
    status_box.innerHTML = "Testing Your Current Bandwidth...";
    document.title = "Bandwidth Test | Running...";
}
function send_ajax_call(){
    var result = '';
    var x = new Date();
    x = x.getTime();
    var latency_url = '<?php print $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']; ?>?latency='+x;
    var url = '<?php print $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']; ?>?ajax='+x; //you will need to change the "?" to a "&" if your URI already has some $_GET variables in it...

    if (window.XMLHttpRequest){
        // code for IE7+, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari
        latency_run = new XMLHttpRequest();
        ajax_run = new XMLHttpRequest();
    }
    else{
        // code for IE6, IE5
        latency_run = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
        ajax_run = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
    }

    latency_run.onreadystatechange = function(){
        if (latency_run.readyState==4 && latency_run.status==200){
            result = latency_run.responseBody;    //ie won't work with responseText, but responseBody will work just fine...
            if (result!=''){
                // alert(latency_starttime);
            }
            else{
                alert('Speed test failed!');
            }
        }
        else if (latency_run.readyState==1){
            //connected to server, start the timer...
            time = new Date();
            latency_starttime = time.getTime();
            document.getElementById('status').innerHTML = "Testing Your Current Latency and HTTP Overhead... Connected..."
        }
        else if (latency_run.readyState==2){
            //server is processing the request...
            document.getElementById('status').innerHTML = "Testing Your Current Latency and HTTP Overhead... Loading..."
        }
        else if (latency_run.readyState==4 && latency_run.status!=200){
            alert('Speed test failed! (' + latency_run.status + ')');
        }
    }
    latency_run.open("GET",latency_url,false);
    latency_run.send();

    ajax_run.onreadystatechange = function(){
        if (ajax_run.readyState==4 && ajax_run.status==200){
            result = ajax_run.responseBody;    //ie won't work with responseText, but responseBody will work just fine...
            if (result!=''){
                //no point in printing the binary result to the page, just update the speed test results...
                update_results();
            }
            else{
                alert('Speed test failed!');
            }
        }
        else if (ajax_run.readyState==1){
            //connected to server, start the timer...
            time = new Date();
            starttime = time.getTime();
            document.getElementById('status').innerHTML = "Testing Your Current Bandwidth... Connected..."
        }
        else if (ajax_run.readyState==2){
            //server is processing the request...
            document.getElementById('status').innerHTML = "Testing Your Current Bandwidth... Loading..."
        }
        else if (ajax_run.readyState==4 && ajax_run.status!=200){
            alert('Speed test failed! (' + ajax_run.status + ')');
        }
    }
    ajax_run.open("GET",url,false);
    ajax_run.send();
}
function update_results(){
    time = new Date();
    endtime = time.getTime();
    latency = starttime - latency_starttime;
    alert(latency_starttime+' '+starttime);
    if (endtime == starttime){
        downloadtime = 0;
    }
    else{
        downloadtime = (endtime - starttime - (latency * 2))/1000;
    }
    kbytes_of_data = <?php print $filesize/$divisor; ?>;
    mbytes_of_data = <?php print $filesize/$divisor/$divisor; ?>;
    ksec = kbytes_of_data / downloadtime;
    msec = mbytes_of_data / downloadtime;
    kbps = addCommas(Math.round(ksec * 8192)/1000);
    mbps = addCommas(Math.round(msec * 8192)/1000);

    ksec = addCommas(Math.round(ksec*100)/100);
    msec = addCommas(Math.round(msec*100)/100);
    var action_row = document.getElementById('action_row');
    var cells = action_row.getElementsByTagName('td');
    var link = document.getElementById('trigger');
    var title = "Bandwidth Test | ";
    var text = '';
    if (msec>1){
        cells[1].innerHTML = "<span>" + mbps + " mbps</span>";
        cells[2].innerHTML = "<span>" + msec + " MB/s</span>";
        cells[3].innerHTML = "<span>" + latency + " ms</span>";
        title += msec + " MB/s";
        text += addCommas(Math.round(mbytes_of_data*100)/100) + ' MB of data transferred in ' + downloadtime + ' seconds...';
    }
    else{
        cells[1].innerHTML = "<span>" + kbps + " kbps</span>";
        cells[2].innerHTML = "<span>" + ksec + " KB/s</span>";
        cells[3].innerHTML = "<span>" + latency + " ms</span>";
        title += ksec + " KB/s";
        text += addCommas(Math.round(kbytes_of_data*100)/100) + ' KB of data transferred in ' + downloadtime + ' seconds...';
    }
    document.title = title;
    document.getElementById('status').innerHTML = text;
    link.style.zIndex = 1;
}
//-->

</script>
<style type="text/css">
*{margin:0;padding:0;}
body{padding:20px;background:#fff;}
table{border-collapse:collapse;position:relative;z-index:0;}
th,td{border:1px solid #000;cursor:default;}
th{padding:2px 5px;font-weight:bold;text-align:center;font-size:16px;}
td{width:120px;text-align:right;}
td span{padding:2px 5px;display:block;line-height:20px;}
td:first-child{width:110px;text-align:left;}
th:first-child{border-top:0;border-left:0;}
a{text-decoration:none;font-weight:bold;font-family:tahoma;font-size:12px;display:block;color:#333;padding:5px;text-align:center;position:relative;z-index:1;}
a:hover{background-color:#333;color:#fff;}
a,a:hover,a:focus,a:active{outline:0;}
#link_box{position:relative;}
#link_mask{display:block;width:100%;height:100%;background:transparent;position:absolute;top:0;left:0;z-index:0;padding:0;line-height:24px;font-size:500px;overflow:hidden;cursor:default;}
#status{margin-top:20px;}
.disabled{background-color:#333;color:#fff;}
.disclaimer td{border-right:0;border-bottom:0;border-left:0;font-size:11px;text-align:right;color:#333;width:auto;}
.disclaimer td em{font-weight:normal;font-style:italic;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<table>
  <thead>
    <tr>

      <th> </th>
      <th>bits</th>
      <th>Bytes</th>
      <th>Latency</th>
    </tr>

  </thead>
  <tbody>
    <tr id="action_row">
      <td><div id="link_box"><a href="javascript:ajax_bandwidth_test();" id="trigger">Start Test</a><span id="link_mask"> </span></div></td>

      <td> </td>
      <td> </td>
      <td> </td>
    </tr>
    <tr class="disclaimer">
      <td colspan="4">[ <em>speeds are only relative to your connection speed with this website</em> ]</td>

    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>
<p id="status"></p>
</body>
</html>
<?php
}
?>