Welcome to the Qwest IP Network Statistics site where you can explore the performance of our industry leading IP network. This interactive site allows you to monitor the latest statistics on our network including latency, packet loss, and availability.

This site utilizes an off the shelf product, Agilent's Firehunter Pro, to collect data about the performance of our IP Backbone. Thus anyone should be able to run the same test independently and achieve the same results. These reports are honest results using real world protocols in near real time. Other sites which give reports of network performance are vague about how they achieved those results and are often using "home-brewed" programs where they can control everything you see. So integrity of the data becomes an issue.

About our Tests and the Protocols Used

There are 4 protocols that we are using to get measurement data, UDP, ICMP (Ping), FTP (Get), and HTTP. Those 4 test's give us 6 measurements:

• Availability
• Packet Loss
• Latency
• HTTP Transfer Time
• FTP Transfer Time
• Jitter

Published data is averaged and presented in current and last seven, thirty and ninety days. The averages viewed on this site are straight averages.

Packet Loss
The data is collected using 20, 64 byte ICMP packets every 5 minutes.

Availability
Uses ping to loopback interfaces on core routers every 5 minutes with a 32 byte ICMP packet.

Latency
The data is collected using 20, 64 byte ICMP packets every 5 minutes.

HTTP - Hyper Text Transfer Protocol
This test provides performance data of one of the most widely used Protocols on the internet today. This protocol is used by every Web server on the Internet. Specifically we're measuring the time it takes to transfer a 2kb web page every 15 minutes between 2 points.

FTP - File Transfer Protocol
This is a very commonly used protocol to move files between two points on a network. For this test, a 1Mb file is transferred from servers at each of the TeraPOP's every 30 minutes.

Jitter
An active test that measures the interpacket delay variance and packet loss in IP networks by generating synthetic UDP traffic. The test utilizes shadow Cisco routers deployed on the Qwest IP Network. The SA Agent sends 20, 214 byte packets, with a specified interpacket delay of 20ms, from the source router to a target router. Values are set to simulate voice traffic. The data returned is the sum of both positive and negative jitter in the destination to source direction divided by the number of packets used in the test, minus 1.

Current

This page displays the current averages of the 6 measurements. Each value returned can drill down to historical values for that measurement. The initial value you'll see is the national average for the 6 tests. The values displayed here are the most current.

Click on a city and receive the current statistics of traffic going to that POP. Again here you can click on a specific measurement and then views it's historical trends.

Point to Point

Within this section of the web site you'll be able to isolate the performance between individual nodes within Qwest IP backbone. Select your Origin and Destination points and then click the blue arrow to the right of the destination box. Your results will include current averages for latency, packet loss, jitter, HTTP transfer time, FTP transfer time and availability. Data will include current and historical seven, thirty and ninety day averages.

Looking Glass

The Looking Glass is a useful tool to receive information on backbone routing, latency, and packet loss. We have further extended its capabilities to allow you to traceroute, ping and do BGP lookups from selected points on our network. The information returned will provide you with a performance comparison of Qwest and non-Qwest networks. Anything with .qwest.net or qwest.com at the end of the name is on the Qwest network. Naturally we are only responsible for nodes within our network.