The Analysis of the Impact of Measurement Reference Points in the Assessment of Internet Access Service Quality

Nowadays Internet service has become an integral part of human life. Moreover, numerous services have migrated to Internet environment as well more and more new services are designed whether to be available on Internet or operated by means of Internet. Therefore, the assessment of the Internet service quality is highly important in order to introduce stable and reliable services. To characterize Internet quality various quality parameters are used, such as latency, jitter, packet loss ratio and probably the most cited parameter upload and download speed. However, the objective assessment of these quality parameters values might be a challenging task since the measurement results of one connection can vary significantly because of the measurement conditions and measurement methodology used. Furthermore, in attempt to represent objective and comparable data among operators in national level or among different countries in European level, it is essential to establish a common reference point for the measurements as well as use similar measurement approach. The aim of this research is to find out whether a unified measurement approach gives an objective representation of internet quality indicators. For this purpose, extended study on the use of international measurement servers was performed within this research.