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Downdetector, Speedtest sold to IT service-provider Accenture in $1.2B deal


in reply to Powderhorn

I actually sat through a pitch for downdetector. They have an enterprise product that shows historical data and trends. You have to pay per service monitored, it was wild.

Expect these to be put fully behind paywalls or some other privacy invading method to maximize value extraction. They use tools to gather outage info from all kinds of sources on social media, not their websites so they don’t rely on user reports as much as some might think.

in reply to Powderhorn

Speedtest hasn't been trustworthy for a while. Okla bought them and immediately started selling to ISPs nodes that they could install (probably just a container or something) that would sit as a "local" speedtest node, so you were testing your connection to the ISP, not testing your actual internet connection. (i.e. giving you the best possible results and what your ISP wanted you to believe).

Fast.com is slightly better in that Netflix spun it up to test your connection to their servers. So it's independent of ISPs - but then they built high speed optic lines to most ISPs so it's more like the second-best possible speed.

Accenture will be the same or worse. I don't trust it for speedtests anymore.

in reply to Scrubbles

I feel like if I let my guard down I’m just going to be tricked at every opportunity… damn
in reply to Scrubbles

Cloudflare also has one that gives you some more data than Netflix'.

speed.cloudflare.com/

in reply to Powderhorn

Oh jeez. In my experience Accenture is barely competent; this does not bode well.
in reply to subignition

They're competent at extracting maximum shareholder value out of each competence-hour unit, even though the amount of competence per hour is on par with the Trump administration.