AT&T, XO Communications and Cable & Wireless provide the fastest backbone services according to a new study by Keynote Systems and Boardwatch magazine. Promoted as the industry's "first full-fledged ranking of pure backbone performance," the study is designed to serve as a comparative shopping guide for organizations evaluating Internet backbone services and Internet service providers (ISPs) purchasing backbone bandwidth.

The Boardwatch/Keynote Backbone Testing Study, published in the May 2002 edition of the Boardwatch Buyer's Guide and Backbone Directory, is the latest in a series of regularly published ISP performance surveys produced by Keynote and Boardwatch since April of 1997, that previously evaluated backbone Web hosting. The new study departs significantly from its predecessors by eliminating Web hosting factors to create instead a new industry measure focusing on pure backbone performance.

The study focuses on the core transport performance of 31 major backbones. Based on more than four million measurements taken over one month and presents performance groups based on the geometric mean performance of network round-trip delay. Within each group, providers are ranked by performance variability.

AT&T, XO and Cable & Wireless were the fastest providers in the May study, with geometric mean average performance in the range of 0.03 seconds. The slowest, McLeodUSA and Touch America, average 0.07 and 0.08 seconds respectively.

"With this latest study and our refinements in methodology and reporting for maximum accuracy, Keynote and Boardwatch have achieved a more absolute measure of backbone performance," said Eric Siegel, principal Internet consultant with Keynote Systems. "The results of this study represent an accurate assessment of pure backbone performance, and should be a useful guide for those evaluating backbone services. We appreciate the cooperation of the ISP community in this effort, and invite continued comments."

The results of the study will be presented in a keynote session at the Service Networks 2002 Spring conference in Baltimore, May 21-23. The presentation will include discussion with some of the providers included in the study.

"Boardwatch and Keynote have been working towards this level of pure performance accuracy for several years," said David Kopf, editorial director of Boardwatch magazine. "Ever since Boardwatch and Keynote teamed up to produce the ISP Index, there has been keen interest for a study of pure backbone performance. We have achieved the first such survey in the industry. We're giving end-users even more reliable data to make ISP and bandwidth decisions."

In order to most accurately represent pure Internet round-trip time, results of the study are based only on the time required to open a TCP connection to the selected file on a single Web server, which involves no applications overhead and eliminates the complexities introduced by distributed server technologies. Measurements were taken over high-bandwidth, non-congested links to represent the true end-user experience on well-maintained corporate connections, and eliminate the effect of a slow last mile.

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The backbone providers in the study are ranked in performance groups according to geometric mean results. This study excluded errors that close examination deemed to be the result of uncharacteristic failure: single episodes during which the test files were unavailable and considered undetectable by customers, when all other measurements were normal. With these errors excluded, all of the providers had error rates below 0.5 percent.

The average error rate for all measurements taken (about four million) was approximately 0.2 percent. The best error rates, approximately 0.1 percent, were for XO Communications and Qwest Communications.

The providers included in the study include Aleron, Ardent, AT&T, Broadwing, Cable and Wireless, Cogent, e.Spire, Fiber Network Solutions, Genuity, Global Crossing, Globix, ICCX, ICG, IDT, Infonet Services, Intermedia, Level3, Lightning Internet, McLeod USA, Metromedia Fiber Network/Abovenet, One Call, Optigate, PSInet, Qwest, Savvis, Sprint, Touch America, Verio, Williams, WorldCom, and XO.

The backbone study is based on over four million measurements, taken every 15 minutes from 53 of Keynote's automated measurement computer links to the 10 leading end-user ISPs in the 25 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. between February 9 and March 7, 2002. The full results are available from Boardwatch, published in its Buyer's Guide and Backbone Directory.