SamKnows Sandbox

SamKnows now has over two thousand configured monitoring devices in homes across the UK running tests and collecting performance data 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. These tests include all of those designed originally for Ofcom's project to create a benchmark for UK Broadband Providers, however, our team of in-house Programmers continue to add to these on a weekly basis. Some of these enhancements are tests that we're thinking up ourselves, others are suggested to us by companies who are coming at this from a slightly different angle.

Our project with Virgin Media has given us direct access to one of the fastest home broadband networks in the UK and some of the leading Engineers. Our ongoing partnership with Ofcom gives us the benefit of a regulator's perspective. Recently we've been receiving a lot of enquiries from companies who are developing IPTV Streaming services, VOIP systems and Teleconferencing solutions. It has been explained to us that the difficulty in developing applications like these is that they are often hard to test in the 'wild'. The SamKnows Performance Network has been designed so that we can deploy new tests within an hour and if we don't have a test already, we're happy to add it to the development roadmap.

Because we are able to simulate user behavior in real-world situations, (by configuring the testing nodes to emulate the behavior of real users), we are able to analyse how technology will work on a granular level. This enables those teams developing cutting edge solutions to test and optimise them. One of the many benefits of a hardware solution is the purity of the data, also that we don't have to wait until a user is online (as you would with a software client). This means that you can collect data on/off peak to see the impact of network contention, for example.

We're calling this service the SamKnows Sandbox, please contact us here if you'd like to hear more or have an interesting project you'd like to discuss.