The majority of NDT clients have migrated to ndt7
Over the past month, M-Lab has published a series of blog posts about ndt7. As of Thursday, August 13th, 2020 roughly 90% of NDT clients using secure websockets have completed the migration from ndt5 to ndt7.
Evolution of NDT
NDT measures “bulk transport capacity”: the maximum date rate that TCP can reliably deliver data using the unreliable IP protocol over an end-to-end Internet path. TCP’s goal is to send data at exactly the optimal rate for the network, containing just the right mix of new data and retransmissions such that the receiver gets exactly one copy of everything. Since its creation, the TCP protocol has consistently made improvements to the way it accomplishes this task, consequently, NDT has also incrementally changed to reflect these improvements. The most recent improvements, including support for TCP BBR, are available in ndt7. On July 24th, we announced the start of migration of NDT clients to the latest protocol version. As of today, approximately 50% of clients are using ndt7. As the ndt7 measurements become the majority of the NDT dataset, the M-Lab team is considering what we do and do not know about whether and how changes to the NDT protocol have affected M-Lab’s longitudinal NDT dataset over time.