Ookla is set to become part of Accenture for $1.2 billion. If regulators approve the deal, Speedtest and DownDetector will get a new owner. As the largest consulting firm for network operators, the purchase is obvious, but alternative services will benefit from the news.
With the acquisition, Accenture aims to provide more network data to customers, giving them insight into the performance of the networks they depend on. The Accenture press release mentions AI-driven benchmarking, incident detection, and optimization of 5G and Wi-Fi networks as applications. Ookla’s platform processes more than 250 million tests every month, including via Ekahau and RootMetrics. Ekahau focuses on optimizing Wi-Fi networks, while RootMetrics measures the performance of mobile networks. For Accenture, these are enough starting points to provide operators with in-house solutions; for customers, dependence on this consulting firm may increase.
Alternatives abound
Accenture already conducted network measurements via umlaut, a division that performs benchmarks for mobile providers. It is possible that this group will now integrate with Ookla, although no statements have been made about this. The main question is whether DownDetector’s consumer focus will remain intact. Another factor is that there are plenty of alternatives if the service loses functionality due to a focus on integration with Accenture services.
Since the information from such services is crowdsourced (as is the case with RootMetrics), adoption is crucial to the quality of the service. Alternative sites such as Is It Down Right Now and Down For Everyone Or Just Me are direct equivalents of DownDetector, but have significantly lower visitor numbers. Tens of millions of reports arrive exclusively at DownDetector; visitors will not usually click on multiple sites in the event of a malfunction outside that site, except perhaps the status page of the service in question.
For organizations, there are plenty of lightweight solutions such as UptimeRobot to check whether their services are available, but DownDetector is also the simplest and most popular solution for them to check user reports via a neutral source.
The speed test battle
Another popular Ookla service is Speedtest, but it has been criticized for some time. For example, the service is said to be “biased” and to favor certain services, but users do not report any structural services that, for example, perform better in the test than is actually the case. There are more than enough alternatives. Google itself offers its own speed test via its search engine, but other solutions such as Cloudflare, Spartyfish, and LibreSpeed are also available. The interface of the latter is Spartan, to say the least, and contains less detail about the connection, but that is also due to its promise to collect less data from the end user than Ookla.
There are more than enough competitors for Ookla services to see adoption growth following an Accenture takeover. This may not be too worrying for the consultancy firm, knowing that it focuses on business customers with data other than the crowdsourced information from well-known online tools.
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