IT consultant and services provider Accenture has agreed to buy Speedtest and Downdetector owner Ookla from Ziff Davis for $1.2 billion in cash.
Accenture plans to integrate Ookla’s data products into its own offerings that are targeted at helping communications service providers, hyperscalers, government entities, and other types of customers “optimize … mission-critical Wi-Fi and 5G networks,” Accenture’s announcement today said.
Ookla’s platform also includes Ekahau, which offers tools for troubleshooting and designing wireless networks, and RootMetrics, which monitors mobile network performance.
Accenture plans to use data gathered from Ookla’s services for applications such as helping hyperscalers and cloud providers “ensure the resilience of AI infrastructure and edge datacenters, which deliver most of the inference workload,” improving fraud prevention in banks, conducting smart home analytics in utilities, and retail traffic optimization.
Oh jeez. In my experience Accenture is barely competent; this does not bode well.
Speedtest hasn’t been trustworthy for a while. Okla bought them and immediately started selling to ISPs nodes that they could install (probably just a container or something) that would sit as a “local” speedtest node, so you were testing your connection to the ISP, not testing your actual internet connection. (i.e. giving you the best possible results and what your ISP wanted you to believe).
Fast.com is slightly better in that Netflix spun it up to test your connection to their servers. So it’s independent of ISPs - but then they built high speed optic lines to most ISPs so it’s more like the second-best possible speed.
Accenture will be the same or worse. I don’t trust it for speedtests anymore.
I feel like if I let my guard down I’m just going to be tricked at every opportunity… damn
I actually sat through a pitch for downdetector. They have an enterprise product that shows historical data and trends. You have to pay per service monitored, it was wild.
Expect these to be put fully behind paywalls or some other privacy invading method to maximize value extraction. They use tools to gather outage info from all kinds of sources on social media, not their websites so they don’t rely on user reports as much as some might think.
