Ask Slashdot: An Accurate Broadband Speed Test? 294
First time accepted submitter kyrcant writes Is there a way to accurately really test my "broadband" connection? I don't trust the usual sites, the first ones I found via Google. I suspect (and found) that at least some of them are directly affiliated with ISPs, and I further suspect that traffic to those addresses is probably prioritized, so people will think they're getting a good deal. The speeds I experience are much, much slower than the speed tests show I'm capable of. For a while I thought it might be the sites themselves, but they load faster on my T-Mobile HTC One via 4G than on my laptop via WiFi through a cable modem connection. Is there a speed test site that has a variable or untraceable IP address, so that the traffic can't be prioritized by my ISP (call them "ConCazt")? If not, which sites are not in any way affiliated with ISPs? Is there a way to test it using YouTube or downloading a set file which can be compared to other users' results?
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None (Score:3)
ndt (Score:5, Informative)
NDT - Argonne National Laboratory
ndt.anl.gov/
Not associated with any ISP.
There are other ndt (network diagnostic tests) as well.
Very detailed reports.
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Won't work if it's widely known.
Speed test sites don't need to be in collusion. ISP's just prioritize their traffic. It's quite obvious with my ISP if I do speed test sites versus just finding something large to download from a cloud storage service.
The obvious issue with that thesis is that you can't prove that the cloud storage site itself is performing slowly due to a bottleneck where it peers with your provider (or many other possible reasons) and while some providers are generally better than others about managing internal bandwidth, none can be said to have ALL uncongested peering points to ALL local customers and this obviously will have the same negative impact on user experience as a locally congested network.
Re:ndt (Score:5, Interesting)
I've done it. I've downloaded a large file from a friend that was taking forever, i.e. in the realm of two hours total time. A half hour in or so, I got sick of it and we both had bandwidth to spare. On a whim, he moved it to a folder on the exact same server called /speedtest/ and I tried again. The second download finished before the first one did and exceeded the bandwidth I was provided (my service is 2 MB/s and the file downloaded at over 3). Literally everything was the same, but one file downloaded at 3MB/s and finished in under 10 minutes and the other chugged along around 200KB/s.
You should try it yourself sometime. Just follow the speedtest.net directory structure.
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Re:ndt (Score:4, Interesting)
Won't work if it's widely known.
Speed test sites don't need to be in collusion. ISP's just prioritize their traffic. It's quite obvious with my ISP if I do speed test sites versus just finding something large to download from a cloud storage service.
The obvious issue with that thesis is that you can't prove that the cloud storage site itself is performing slowly due to a bottleneck where it peers with your provider (or many other possible reasons) and while some providers are generally better than others about managing internal bandwidth, none can be said to have ALL uncongested peering points to ALL local customers and this obviously will have the same negative impact on user experience as a locally congested network.
I've actually used the SpeedTest sites to help improve downloading of Linux DVD ISO images. When I started the download (FTP/HTTP download) the quoted time was well over 8 hours, and the transfer rate was abysmal (60KBps to 120KBps on a multi-MBps line). Out of curiosity I ran a speed test through DSLReports and then found that the download rate jumped to 300KBps. After a while it would drop back to down to the previous range; I'd run the speed test again and voila, but up it went. I ended up downloading the entire Linux DVD ISO in under 1hour.
FYI, that was on AT&T DSL - not uVerse, just plain DSL since that is all we can get in our apartment. So obviously the ISPs are padding the numbers; which is a natural outcome of the FCC wanting people to report the ISPs that are not holding up.
Re:ndt (Score:4, Informative)
Won't work if it's widely known.
Speed test sites don't need to be in collusion. ISP's just prioritize their traffic. It's quite obvious with my ISP if I do speed test sites versus just finding something large to download from a cloud storage service.
Doublepost...
One does not simply measure bandwidth
Without starting five or six torrents and leaving u/l and d/l limits turned off
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Re:None (Score:5, Informative)
I like http://speedof.me/ [speedof.me]
It's fast, works with HTML5, works on mobile, tablet, desktop. As far as I can tell, it's hosted in the Amazon Cloud.
-frank
Re:None (Score:4, Informative)
Speed test sites are fundamentally flawed, but bribery has nothing to do with it.
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Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
How are people not aware of DSLReports and their speed tests? And how could this possibly make /.?
Also, your wi-fi sucks. Get a cable if you want to know what your real speed is.
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So which speed test from DSLReports do you suggest we use?
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Maybe you should follow the instructions on their Tools page:
Speed Test
We have the following speed tests
Flash (Adobe) download/upload speed test
Accurate for tests of residential DSL and cable connections
Java download/upload speed test
Capable of higher speed testing, for example, fiber
Mobile browser Speed and Latency Test (http://i.dslr.net/iphone_speedtest.html)
Javascript Speedtest, for mobile full featured browsers (iPhone, Android and so on)
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How are people not aware of DSLReports and their speed tests? And how could this possibly make /.?
Also, your wi-fi sucks. Get a cable if you want to know what your real speed is.
The ISPs cheat for the speed tests by temporarily increasing your bandwidth so that the tests detect a higher transfer rate than what they are actually giving you. They don't even prioritize just the DSL testing sites either; at least AT&T DSL doesn't.
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So that's different from what they actually advertise, speeding up the first X megabytes or whatever? (I _think_ that's what Xfinity Blast is, but I can't actually find a description on their site at the moment.)
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed he should accuse WIFI with no evidence, but at the same time it is not a legitimize test with WIFI in the loop. If he's experience connection issues or measuring performance of his cable connection, then he should do a direct connection to eliminate WIFI since it is very susceptible to many issues that could affect performance. Only then can he point fingers at the cable connection.
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Oh I should have proof read that, there is some grammar murdering going on there. You get the idea though.
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Oh I should have proof read that, there is some grammar murdering going on there. You get the idea though.
Don't worry, we just assumed your grammar got messed up over your WiFi connection.
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What should he accuse WIFI of doing?
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not really fair to immediately disregard the quality of the WiFi connection. It could be well in excess of the ISP connection.
I have a 40/20 mbps broadband, and independent local non-ISP speed tests give the same result on WiFi as ethernet, around 37-38/18-19 mbps. But, I do agree that if you get shitty results, you should try to rule out that shitty WiFi is the reason.
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Not really fair to immediately disregard the quality of the WiFi connection. It could be well in excess of the ISP connection.
Have you ever even used wifi?
802.11b = 11 mbps, real world throughput = ~6 mbps.
802.11g = 54 mbps, real world throughput = ~20 mbps.
802.11n = 300 mbps, real world throughput = ~60 mbps.
802.11ac = 1500 mbps, real world throughput = ~160 mbps.
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My wifi with the EM clutter from 20 visible Wifi networks, as measured from across my apartment: dial-up speed on some days, around 100 mbps on others. I wouldn't use it for an ISP speed test.
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it "should" only slow down if everyone is using it at the same time and some of those people are further away then you are to their wireless router.
That's pretty much the case with 15' wide, 40' long townhouses all in a row, where everyone has modern WiFi routers (and there's also a row of storefronts along the back of the townhouses, and some businesses there offering free WiFi to customers, to further crowd the area). I just use long ethernet cables for the important endpoints.
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Microsoft uses Akamai, and unless you use their download manager the throughput is kinda crap, at least on AT&T with our own DNS servers.
VPS (Score:5, Interesting)
Rent or trial a VPS. You can get them for literally a few pounds/dollars per month.
Put a large file on Apache on it.
Download the file from several places.
Rename the file on the server to check it's not cached.
The "upper limit" on this is then the VPS, which generally are connected direct to 100mbps lines in a datacenter somewhere. If you think it's limited by the VPS, get another from another provider. Or load up iptraf or some packet capture and see how it did.
Speedtest websites are indicative only, and are cheated on by some places. Your own website can't be cheated on - you will see the request coming in and can watch the outgoing traffic to see where the bottleneck lies.
Re:VPS (Score:5, Informative)
Rent or trial a VPS. You can get them for literally a few pounds/dollars per month.
The old timey way of doing speed tests is to hit up FTPs and see what your max sustained speed is.
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If your disk is slower than your network connection then either you have terrible disks, or your network connection is just peachy and you should stop worrying about it.
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The problem with FTP is that it can be a PITA to make sure it is measure memory to memory speeds and not disk to disk speeds. Sometimes you can write files to /dev/null and read from /dev/zero (and then manually abort it since /dev/zero is endless).
If your downlink out paces your disk writes, it's time to upgrade.
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If your downlink out paces your disk writes, it's time to upgrade.
Or, if you have a good SSD and your download is faster than the disk, your network is fast enough...stop worrying.
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I usually like to build the file with random data and then run it through gzip to make sure the data is in no way compressible.
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If your port 80 is being throttled, it's being throttled. That's going to affect a random website as much as your VPS.
All we avoid is ISP's "unthrottling" select websites to give you a false impression that throttling isn't enabled. That's exactly what a VPS download will discover - the real download speed of your connection to a random website.
UC Berkeley's NetAlyzr. (Score:2, Interesting)
UC Berkeley's NetAlyzr.
DIY test (Score:2, Interesting)
If your ISP doesn't fiddle with your traffic, a heavily seeded torrent will normally do a good job of saturating your connection.
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mod parent up. I find a newish torrent with a dozen or so seeders will saturate my connection (7MBit cellular).
Re: DIY test (Score:2, Insightful)
Torrent on cellular? You are why we can't have nice things.
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Friends with internet.
Get one.
Test your upload. It will have the simultaneous benefit of testing their download speeds.
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Saturating my download is simple, it's my upload that's hard.
You could also try for total composite speeds by using a bunch of torrents. My seedbox regularly runs 40Mbps total upload speed on the 50+ torrents, even though no one torrent is running that fast. I actually throttle the max upload to 50Mbps to allow 30Mbps free bandwidth to FTP the files to my home.
kernel.org? ftp.insert-ftp-site-here.whatever? (Score:2)
Seriously, find a handful of known-high-bandwidth places to download stuff from and download some large files from each of them and use your PC's network-monitoring tools to gauge your bandwidth.
As for as upstream, get some email account from various providers, compose a message, and attach a large-ish file.
Note - if your ISP gives you "burst speed" you will have to "burn through that" before you start getting "real" numbers.
I use speedof.me (Score:4, Informative)
And frequently score higher on my tmobile phone than on comcast (up to 30 vs up to 15)
SamKnows from the FCC (Score:5, Insightful)
https://www.samknows.com/ [samknows.com]
I have one of their boxes installed. It seems to provide a clear picture of overall performance with a monthly report. I'm doing this because I'd like to think it helps the FCC keep the ISPs honest.
PS - Card carrying Libertarian. No the FCC isn't spying on me, and yes regulation of ISPs is appropriate. If we've broken the free market by granting a local monopoly or limited oligopoly then heavy regulation is appropriate. Consumer choice is better, but this is the best we can do with what we have today.
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https://www.samknows.com/ [samknows.com]
I'm doing this because I'd like to think it helps the FCC keep the ISPs honest.
It probably also helps to ensure that *your* connection gets priority...
I have one of the boxes as well and ensuring that my ISP is motivated to give me good service was part of the reason I put it in. I also think that it is a good idea to have a FCC based performance monitoring infrastructure out there. While I don't think the program is monitoring user's activity, I am a bit on the paranoid side, so I don't run all my traffic through the box (which is a supported configuration.)
As an aside, I am on FIO
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Thank you for mentioning that. I am a FIOS customer in the Washington, D.C. area. I regularly interact with remote machines at my employer in North Carolina. I have the Verizon FIOS 25/15 plan. During normal business hours, it works great. But starting in the late afternoon, usually around 5-6 pm every night, round trip times go to crap.
[...]
Have you experienced this kind of problem, and did it change after you installed your samknows box? Thanks...
I am in the Portland, Oregon area. When FIOS first came to the area it was put in by Verizon. Since then they have sold the assets to Frontier, who now runs my FIOS. My experience has been that I have always gotten full speed from my FIOS connection under both Verizon and Frontier and both before and after the SamKnows box was installed. I haven't seen a change in behavior. Note that I have had my FIOS service since 2007 and participated in SamKnows since 2010. The public NetFlix related complaints with Ver
Re:SamKnows from the FCC (Score:4, Interesting)
Other Libertarian here. ISPs are a product of government collusion (monopoly) practices. The further a government is away from me, the less I trust it.
That being said, we do not need MORE regulation of ISPs, we need out of the box thinking to reframe the last mile problem. I have NO problem with a local municipality running last mile service, as long as I get to choose which provider gets to my house. This would require Fiber to the premise, running back to a COLO that is rented (funded) out to service providers to provide ANYTHING they want to the customer. A choice of four or six providers at the COLO to choose from, and a simple Network VLAN change to change providers.
THIS would negate the need for ANY regulation. If Johnny Christian wants to have Jesus.net cable co, he can get it. If Mary Rotten wants all porn and drug channels, she is free to choose that. Comcast will be forced to stop playing games, because they will lose customers if they throttle YouTube and Netflix.
Almost all problems we have right now, are caused by last mile monopolies. Lets inject CHOICE, rather than regulation into the market.
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This would require Fiber to the premise, running back to a COLO that is rented (funded) out to service providers to provide ANYTHING they want to the customer. A choice of four or six providers at the COLO to choose from, and a simple Network VLAN change to change providers.
That's what they already have in Iceland, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands!
Libertarians dream of a world with X. Socialists live in that world.
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Because small monoculture Scandinavian countries are the same as the Melting pot of the world that has a multicultural world view.
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Just to be sure we're talking about the same "choice", I see that Sweden has two or three Cable providers. The idea of a Cable provider going to COLO facility is crazy, unless they are splitting available Cable frequencies. To be honest, it looks like the "choice" is pathetic even if it does what I suggested. Then I look at the number of Cable Channels offered and I think I currently have more shopping channels those cable providers carry (slightly sarcastic). the number of channels is pathetic.
Which is, ex
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Possibly. Though I don't think liberals want to watch much of Joel Osteen. ;)
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Bit Torrent (Score:3)
It's hard to know if slow speeds are from your connection or the server you're connecting to or something in between. If you download a linux distro over bit torrent you'll be bypassing any individual server bottleneck and any (except local) general network slow downs. I usually get extremely good speeds from bit torrent, pushing 15 mbit, from my "15 mbit" fios connection. I don't use it a lot so I don't see any alleged throttling from it.
DSLReports or any of that stuff is only useful to determine if you have a decent working internet connection. They should never be used for any sort of benchmarking as one has to assume carriers optimize connections to them to make themselves look good.
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So they made available a bunch of files to play with.
ftp://ftp.xs4all.nl/pub/test/ [xs4all.nl]
Youtube speed test won't tell you anything (Score:2)
Youtube speed test won't tell you anything as youtube content tends to be cached locally at your ISP by GGC (Google Global Cache).
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And yet, for about a year with Time Warner, YouTube was the ONLY bad site. Constant and endless buffering. Until I set my preferred video to 720p. And then it ran much faster than the 240p, 360p or 1080p.
Then someone told me this could be fixed by switching to Google's DNS and sure enough it went away immediately.
No (Score:4, Insightful)
There is no way to test "The internet"
The fact of the matter is you make dozens of hops, even hundreds, to get anywhere. En-route you can hit any number of choke points. If you run a speed test I can almost guarantee your ISP knows about the speed test site and is going to prioritize your traffic. Add to that the fact that the speed test site is likely hosted somewhere like the Amazon cloud and all you're testing is your route to about the easiest place to get to.
Is your ISP throttling Torrents? Netflix? Youtube? A test to any other site is useless if they prioritize that and throttle where you actually want to go. Is there a problem with your NID? The remote you connect to? The peering they have setup?
On top of all of that, speed test sites are just a test of downloading various file sizes. That's easy... flawless movie playback and seamless online game play? That's an entirely different story. You've no idea how many friends I've had complain about their ISP throttling their game, only to find out later the problem cleared up when they got a new video card. lol
So if your ISP is not working for your needs, you need to switch. If you have other options, most offer a contract free option now-a-days. Try that out and cancel if it's no better. If you have no other options, you're stuck with it anyway.
Your best bet, if you're stuck with that ISP, is to make friends with a tech. Get one out there for some reason, offer him a beer, whatever. Joke, laugh, etc... he'll probably tell you what's up. Once you know where the problem is, often you can figure out how to talk them into a better solution. In these situations you're usually fighting their bureaucracy... its not that they don't want to help, it's just a lot of paperwork to get that help. Be more annoying than the paperwork.
Xfinity Speed Test (Score:5, Funny)
As far as I can tell, they are not affiliated with any ISP.
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A few options... (Score:3)
I had more luck with the following:
http://speedof.me/ [speedof.me] - HTML5 Internet speed test (no Flash or Java needed). It claims to be the "smartest and most accurate online bandwidth test".
http://testmy.net [testmy.net] - Nice graph and intelligent picking of the size of the test file to download.
Short answer: No (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a network engineer at an ISP, so I would say I have a bit of experience with this from both ends of the table. First of all, there's a difference between your broadband connection speed and your perceived rate. Your broadband connection might be capped to what you pay for, and, assuming your last-mile medium can handle that speed, that only means that you will never actually go beyond your connection speed.
Now as we know, the internet is a complicated network of interconnected systems. You are connected via your ISP's backbone to the other systems (ISPs, enterprises, content providers, etc.) via a number of internet peering points. These peering points have their own connection speed (typically 1 Gbit/s or 10 Gbit/s, although higher exist), and may or may not be utilised to their maximum extent at any point of time. This means that you may have your full data rate available to some destinations, while others may take a congested route.
You mention testing, and your frustration is very reasonable. There are testing sites out there, but you never have any idea about how many else might be testing at the same time, or how much load there is on the server at the moment of the test. If you are unlucky, you might also be limited by your hardware, your operating system (TCP Window Size, receive buffers and similar might not be tuned properly), or your router.
I would say your best choice would be to download as much as possible from as many sources as possible (bittorrent is excellent for this, but may be throttled by evil ISPs), and do this over a couple of days to get an average indication of how much your connection is capable of delivering.
If you have a server on some remote location via the internet, you can use programs like iperf to make a bandwidth test, but such a test is not exactly precise when you have no idea how the intermediate networks are.
A few options. (Score:2)
If you have a system that you can test against (i.e. a server at your work with a fatter-pipe then you have at home, or a hosted server/VPS/etc.)
iperf
run "iperf -s" on the server and "iperf -c server.ip.address" on the client.
Read the man pages for more options.
If you don't have a 'known better then you' to test against try this to test your maximum download bandwidth.
Simple test: download a large file from Microsoft (i.e. a 'network install' service pack, or similar) or other big-host
More complicated:
r
Comment removed (Score:3)
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http://www.measurementlab.net/... [measurementlab.net]
Unfortunately, the number of ridiculous hoops you need to go through to let an unsigned Java applet run an arbitrary network I/O makes it much less useful.
They now have a Flash version as well, so it's easier. But the numbers appear really low, claiming that my network buffer limits download to 140Mbps, yet I have often downloaded actual files from the Internet at faster than that.
OTOH, all the Ookla-powered sites claim I get over 70% of my 1Gbit network card speed [speedtest.net], which I also find hard to believe, despite having a 20Gbps connection to our ISP (with literally thousands of users, one of which is a server I maintain that downloads at over 2000Mbps 24/7 backi
BitTorrent or some other p2p file downloader (Score:3)
Pick a popular torrent — like a recent release of your favorite BSD or Linux distro — and start downloading (without any limits on your client side, of course). Watch the bandwidth. With a large number of peers, your measurement will be insulated from the oddities of any particular connection.
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If you have a typical asymmetrical connection you'll want to limit your number of peers to ~200 per 1Mbps of upload you have, any more than that and you tend to actually see your download speeds slow as your client uses so much bandwidth managing peers that it chokes off the return packets to keep the download speed going.
To many variables (Score:2)
Another way t
Two cents, two alternatives. (Score:2)
Usenet (Score:3)
Download some binaries from a Usenet provider, that'll max out your connection.
I generally get ~13.5MBps down on my 120Mbps connection from Rogers. Uploading to my VPS gets me a solid 2MBps out of 20Mbps.
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Grown Up Terminology (Score:2)
Really?
Either just say, "... my ISP, Comcast..." or don't name them at all. Trying to be cute just muddles the conversation and gains absolutely nothing.
Why do you care about other people's results, too? Just upload a large file to somewhere with known good bandwidth (amazon S3 might be a good choice, or FTP it to Dreamhost, or whatever), time it, then pull it back down again (and time that). You'll get a pretty accurate "actual bandwidth" there.
If you're paranoid - and it appears that you are - make the
Shaper Probe (Score:3)
.
http://www.measurementlab.net/... [measurementlab.net]
Runs on OS-X, Windows, Linux. Port available on FreeBSD.
Stream test urls (Score:3)
Netflix offers several test streams [netflix.com] for validating your speeds, and Google has a Video Quality Report [google.com]
I find that the Speedtest.Net results are a realistic estimate of my actual best case upload/download speed, but there are certainly some websites which are much slower to load, for various reasons. If you suspect your ISP is throttling some websites intentionally, you can always browse through a VPN service.
As mentioned previously, local WiFi problems are often the root cause of slow page loads. Go wired. You can also use the network debugging tools built into Firefox (Network Monitor) [mozilla.org] and MSIE [microsoft.com] to try to determine what parts of a page are particularly slow.
Try popular torrents (Score:2)
Downloading a popular TV show episode over Bittorrent will saturate your link. It is a good measure of your connection speed.
Android FCC Speed test (Score:2)
In theory the ISP's might look to see where your data is headed and make adjustments based on that, but that of course would be deceitful.
VPN improves my net performance and test results (Score:2)
I had been noticing poor performance from Youtube when watching videos (buffering, dropping to low-res, etc). Then I noticed that youtube seemed to work much better while I was connected through VPN, which is the opposite of what you would expect, at least in theory. But I realize that ISPs have been playing throttling games with large video sites like Youtube and Netflix.
However, I did another test and the results of it were more surprising for me. I have 3mbps DSL service through Verizon. If I run a test
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I don't know if my VPN uses compression, but that's a good tip. I will check that out, thanks!
Meaningless (Score:3)
These speed tests are basically meaningless. There are too many factors that might affect the throughput and latency from your desktop or device to any given site.
Meaningful tests might include:
- local link test to neighborhood node, Internet access point - your ISP would need to install test servers in local (neighborhood, at least for cable setups) nodes and wherever traffic exits their network to the Internet. This would allow you to test latency and throughput within your ISPs own system. Obviously, this ultimately limits possible Internet speeds. Your ISP almost certainly already has these kinds of test servers. But they may or may not expose them or advertise them to users.
- A test employing MULTIPLE SIMULTANEOUS test servers. This would at least attempt to assess your available bandwidth "to the Internet".
You should not have any reasonable expectation of achieving the maximum theoretical throughput of your "Internet connection" to any given site. Or any one site at all. I do not know why people obsess so over these meaningless tests.
They're not necessarily trying to trick you (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't trust the usual sites, the first ones I found via Google. I suspect (and found) that at least some of them are directly affiliated with ISPs, and I further suspect that traffic to those addresses is probably prioritized, so people will think they're getting a good deal.
I just wanted to point out that they're not necessarily trying to trick you by running these speed tests. For one thing, if they wanted to trick you, they could always just compile a list of popular test sites and prioritize/uncap that traffic.
But it's actually somewhat valid for ISPs to provide tests that, in a sense, are biased. Let's say you have a Verizon connection. Verizon may want to provide a testing mechanism to make sure you're getting the advertised connection to their network, to make sure things are operating properly. If you have a slow connection to Slashdot, for example, that might just mean that Slashdot is slow. It might mean that your route to Slashdot has been saturated somehow, and that might not be Verizon's fault. There are a lot of things that could possibly go wrong that could cause your connection to Slashdot to be bad, and Verizon can't rely on that as a good test.
So what Verizon would want to do is provide a test that simply confirms that your connection to their network is running at advertised speeds, which would mean testing between your home computer and another machine on their network. If that is operating at advertised speeds, but your connection to some endpoint is slow, then the problem is probably between Verizon's network and the endpoint, and not between you and Verizon's network.
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You just gave me an idea....
I'm thinking about making a VPN Service that "Looks like" a speed test.
Very simple.... you request a HTTP download of file45456.zip and a simultaneous HTTP upload of file45457.zip
To maintain the connection, your VPN client will do this repeatedly.
However.... inside the HTTPS transfer there will be the encrypted IP packets you are exchanging encapsulated.
Also... of course, the same website will have a speedtest, all over HTTPS :)
Re:Ask yourselves these questions... apk (Score:5, Funny)
All right. Just who woke him up this time? Whoever it is, you need to put him back down in his bunker and this time LOCK THE DOOR.
Re:Ask yourselves these questions... apk (Score:4, Insightful)
Even being noisily right with an answer to a question that nobody's asking, in a conversation about something completely different, is annoying and should be discourages.
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That appears to be run by OOKLA, the same guys who run Speedtest.net.
I don't trust Speedtest.net's results, either, as they seem to ALWAYS run at the maximum speed for the connection even when my Internet connection on sites like Youtube or Netflix is slow. I think that there is some shady content prioritization going on there.
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That's because your ISP throttles Youtube and Netflix.
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Youtube gets plenty screwed up without ISP throttling. There are days when I can't watch some videos on Youtube at the lowest resolution, but others are fine in HD, and my ISP is on Google's "nice" list for Youtube.
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I thought this at first, also, but I have had a pretty close match to Speedtest's claims when using scp to send large files to/from my EC2 instances.
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To what?
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1.5 Mbs, synchronous, rock solid and dedicated.
If you can afford it. You do not need faster and it has to be up it is great. Also I have 4xBonded T1 as a backup to my 50 Mbps fiber at work. The copper and fiber runs are completely different and gives me awesome piece of mind.
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I don't really think a 1ms away ISP speedtest counts much either. Show me full speed from a server 200ms+ away. I
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They all count... on the one hand you're testing your local loop, on the other you're testing your ISPs peering. Both are valid tests.
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1. get a speedtest.something domain
2. patch a bittorrent client to register all your peers to that domain dynamically and connect via http to each other
3. ????
4. 1gb/s torrents!
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You can download the speedtest widget, and load it on a webserver, and then use that to test your speed.
http://www.speedtest.net/mini.... [speedtest.net]
If you have a server you can install it on, Speedtest Mini is great. It uses their same basic setup, but allows you to run it somewhere other than a standard "speedtest" server, in case you think those servers are being handled differently.