This is gonna be long - Sorry in advance
Firstly - These tests have been done by myself, I am not affiliated with WGL in any way. In fact I have been trying to get in contact with them for a couple of weeks but they seem unable to call me back to go over any of my thoughts, or my concerns. Below is an outline of what i have found in regards to the WGL app on the Android operating system. I will provide screenshots and as much information as possible so you too can hopefully replicate my results.
Secondly I will be using the term "Effective Download Speed" - this is the speed at which the useful data is delivered to the device. This does not include overhead of packets or any of that other guff that is actually included when you send data around a network. This is the stuff that end users are actually interested in.
I am testing both the claims of speed and data saving. To do this I am using a Linux .iso file that is 1.69 gigabytes in size for my first round of tests. To be able to measure the success of the tests I'll using my home internet connection 100Mbits, a highly customisable router, a new Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge and a number of years of experience in the IT sector.
The iso file can be found
here. I am using the Optus mirror so that bandwidth should be consistent across all tests.
To begin, I set a baseline for the download. I was able to download the .iso file on my connection in 4 minutes. At an effective download speed of 60Mbits/s
I then turned on WGL, selected my nearest server, Brisbane, disabled data saving, and let it go as fast as it could. below is a 1 minute graph of what it looked like.
View attachment 416957
This was consistent for the entire 16 minute download and i achieved a staggering ~3.5% data saving. Now i didn't actually screen cap this while I did the test so I am actually running it again while I typing it and getting the same result.
Now I want to be clear. This is
not a bad thing the reason for this is because any sensible network engineer would put an upper limit on what bandwidth a user could put through a system. In this case it seems to be about 20Mbits/s. Once you go over that, sheet gets weird. The reason for the limit is you dont want a university or something to steal a couple of gigs of bandwidth and screw over all your other users.
So based on the 16 minute result we have an effective download speed of ~16Mbits/s.
I then turned on data saving and I got a very similar result ... same graph, however, it took 18 minutes not 16 so effective download speed was 13.5Mbits/s.
Overall a bit disappointing but makes sense, WGL isn't designed for people with fast internet. So I capped my own internet to 8Mbits/sec Download and 2Mbits/sec Upload.
This is a typical adsl 2+ connection speed here in Australia.
Once again No WGL base test same .iso file same mirror download.
This time the download took 40 minutes. Which is on par with what is to be expected with a slower internet speed.
I then opened up WGL, made sure it was set to Brisbane, and data saving off. This download took 32mins total so a definite speed increase here and the speed graph was consistent pretty much all the way through. a couple little bumps like this one, but that could have been something else on my network phoning home.
View attachment 416960
In the end we ended up with the same data saving though of around 3%.
View attachment 416963
Next I tried again with Data Saving on with everything else the same.
The download time was 40 minutes, which i expected it to be a bit longer as now we are meant to be using the compression algorithm. Below is a graph of how the data flowed fore those 40 minutes.
View attachment 416954
and here is the savings *cough*
View attachment 416975
Once again nothing changed on the data saving front. Still sitting at 3%.
I then ran all the same tests again for the Sydney server and they were the same, within about 20 seconds of each other and 1% of the data savings.
CONCLUSION - READ THIS BIT
So what does this all mean. Basically I was able to achieve a 33% effective speed increase by using the WGL app. That is pretty darn significant. It is not the 500% or any of the other rubbish that the company claims however its definitely nothing to be sneezed at.
The limitations of the App:-
If you are on a connection of 15Mbits/sec or under you will see a performance increase.
If you are on a connection over 20Mbits/sec, you will be going backwards as far as i can tell.
In between those, probably a coin flip.
I am confident this is why we have people on HC on both sides saying, "This is Great" and "This is Crap". I was able to experience both by changing a couple of settings on my router. On slower connections a 33% speed increase is significant, it can easily be the difference between being able to watch a streaming service and not.
Where the management have let us down is by not clarifying, but it should be obvious, if you have a 100Mbit connection you are not going to get a 500Mbit Connection, or even a 133Mbit Connection. The data centers just dont have enough pipe to be able to deliver that out to everyone who signs up. Especially not for $5/month.
The next thing i would like to highlight is my thoughts on speedtest.net further clarification is needed on how users are able to get results faster than 20-30Mbits/sec when that seems to be a cap on the server. This doesn't seem right and management need to clarify how this is possible.
I was not able to see much in terms of data savings in any of my tests, however I have seen quite a few posters say that they are getting them. This is just like many things, some things can be compressed and some things cannot. If someone can give me an example of what they are doing to get data compression consistently I will run similar tests again.
The last point is that, this means that it works... Think about that for a second. The only limiting factors right now are bandwidth at the data centre and processor speed for the data compression. Both of these things are easily upgradable. But as a proof of concept this is ticking all the boxes for me in terms of speed and if i can get in contact with someone about how to optimise the data streams. That will be another big plus.
Common Question Notes
Brisbane server no difference between data saving on and off 3% saving. Alot more instability on the connection with data saving turned on and 8 minute longer download. Works out to about a 33% speed increase. The original download taking 40Minutes equates to an average download speed of 6 megabits/sec the new time of 32minutes equates to an average speed of approx 8 megabits /sec.
You may notice that i said that I capped my internet at 8000 kilobits/sec which is 8 megabits/sec and be thinking why is the no wangle slower than the maximum allowed. The thing is its not, If you look at the bandwidth monitor you can see that there is always 8Mbps coming through the pipe. without WGL there is just more overhead, in the packets and less "data" for the download. The best way to think of it is there is 6Mbps of the data we want coming through without wangle, and nearly 8Mbps of the data we want coming through with Wangle.
