eValid™ -- Automated Web Quality Solution Browser-Based, Client-Side, Functional Testing & Validation, Load & Performance Tuning, Page Timing, Website Analysis, and Rich Internet Application Monitoring.

Summary
How do the WebSites of the Top 10 Network Equipment compare in terms of Best Online Experience?

Goals
For this comparative analysis of WebSites we use two important dimensions to rank order each WebSite in terms of Best Online Experience:

• Ease of Navigation. This factor is a combination of the average rate of download of pages and the number of successful page retrievals. A high score for ease of navigation means that users will have quick responses as they work on the WebSite, and that they will find very few broken or unavailable pages.
• Quality of Maintenance. This factor is based on the relative age of pages found on the WebSite. A well-maintained WebSite has very-current information, and indicates that great care has been taken to assure the quality of the information.

We used the eValid WebSite analysis engine, programmed (see below) to collect specific metrics that contribute to these factors. To assure accuracy the measurements were done over a short time frame and using identical access capabilities.

Results
The measurements we made of the WebSites of the selected Network Equipment companies produced the relative Quality of Online Experience comparison chart shown. The data shown are all normalized relative values.

The best-performing WebSites are in the upper right of the chart, and the worst-performing WebSites are in the lower left of the chart.

Individual Summary Results
The table below shows all of the results used to construct the comparative chart. Click to see the eValid Summary Report with the raw data. Click to see the 3D-SiteMap for each WebSite. Here are Animations and Usage Instructions for the 3D-SiteMaps. Right-click anywhere on any 3D-SiteMap for documentation. Here are some Usage Hints if you want to dig deeper in the 3D-SiteMaps.

#	Company	Click For Summary Report	Comments	Click For SiteMap	Comments
1	Alcatel www.alcatel.com	eValid Report	B: A very big site, but relatively slow and with an annoying broken link content in the top three layers.		B: Good spread from base, followed by very large spread to second layer, a few backward links.
2	Ciena www.ciena.com	eValid Report	A: Very fast, and virtually without link failure, this moderate-sized site (less than the 5000 link limit in total) is very current but tends to have a high percentage of large pages.		A: Good, limited expansions from base, no backward dependence, good focus from various locations.
3	Cisco www.cisco.com	eValid Report	C+: This a very fast site, and it has few navigation failures, but the pages are 75% old and thus it is not under heavy update (at least not in the top two layers).		A-: Classic structure, good expansion from the base page, but the site appears to have a second "virtual base page" two layers down from the top.
4	Ericsson www.ericsson.com	eValid Report	C-: Very slow site with a high percentage of broken links and slow-loading (large) pages.		C: Typical site structure but with some confused dependencies and backward links. Fast near the top.
5	Extreme www.extremenetworks.com	eValid Report	A-: A smaller site (fewer than 5000 links in the top three layers), relatively fast and current, but with quite a few broken/unavailable pages.		B-: Good layout but too few links from top and no cross-linking; some backward links.
6	Juniper www.juniper.net	eValid Report	B+: A moderate sized site, very fast, and very clean but with a high fraction of large pages (~55%).		B: Good structure and spread, some cross-layer linking, minimal backward linking.
7	Lucent www.lucent.com	eValid Report	A+: This is a very fast, very well maintained site that is very current.		B+: Good structure, a few accumulation points, and some backward links.
8	Nortel www.nortelnetworks.com	eValid Report	A-: A very fast site but relatively dirty and with a high proportion of large pages.		B-: Good structure, but too many options at each layer, some cross-layer issues, and some backward links.
9	Redback www.redback.com	eValid Report	A-: A smaller site (less than 200 pages through depth three) but very clean, very fast, and quite current.		A-: Good, straightforward structure but has a few backward links.
10	3Com www.3com.com	eValid Report	C: Very slow and somewhat oldish, this site has an uncomfortable number of broken/unavailable links.		A: Clean and simple structure, well organized and good elaboration.

Methodology
To collect the data used in the chart we used the eValid WebSite analysis engine with parameter settings as follows:

• Search Mode. We used the HTTP Normal mode which scans pages in the background without using the cache (all pages are freshly downloaded).
• Depth of Search. All of these tests were done with a maximum tree depth of 3. Most of these WebSites are many layers deeper.
• Large Page Threshold. We chose a relatively small 10 KByte limit for this factor because user response is usually best when the total page size is small. 10 KBytes @ 5 KBytes/second = 2.0 secs.
• Slow Page Threshold. We chose a 2.0 sec threshold to decide if a page was slow loading.
• Old Page Threshold. Here we chose a threshold of 1 day (24 hrs) to emphasize the stability of the site.
• Broken/Unavailable Link Counts. This factor is expressed as a percentage of the total number of URLs visited.
• Excluded URLs. To make sure that the report was not biased by the existence of long and very-long files -- PDF format files, for example -- these suffixes and a similar set were blocked from consideration.
• Mapped Links Limit. Because these corporate WebSites tend to be very large we imposed a 5000-link limit in each run. This limit means that eValid maps only the URLs that give rise to the first 5000 links. After the limit is reached eValid continues to search out properties of the already-enumerated URLs that gave rise to those links.
• 3D-SiteMap Limit. For simplicity the 3D-SiteMaps were made with depth 2, 1000-link limits, and don't include graphics URLs.

Web Access Details
All tests were done on a 384 Kbps (peak performance value) ADSL connection. The data was collected with successive eValid runs during normal business hours.