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Building fast.com
- aggieben 10y ago1. When will someone build a tool like this and then open up the measurements data? A speed-measuring tool would be infinitely more useful if we could investigate the results beyond just our one device for one test. A question I really want to be able to answer: which ISP offers the fastest service in my area? fast.com and speedtest.net could easily answer this question if they made the data available. 2. I think tests like this that rely on a built-out network and well-placed CDNs and such are probably junk. A more useful test would be against a handful of download targets that aren't optimized, and then average the results. This is particularly true for Netflix. Case in point: fast.com says I download at 78Mbps, but speedtest.net has me down around 57. I'm only paying for 30.
- m1r3k 10y agoDslreports speedtest publishes the results publicly: http://speedtest.dslreports.com/ http://speedtest.dslreports.com/
- aggieben 10y agoThey appear to only publish it by ISP. Part of my problem is not knowing comprehensively what ISPs serve my area, so I need to look it up by zip code or city.
- djrogers 10y ago>I think tests like this that rely on a built-out network and well-placed CDNs and such are probably junk. Depends on the goal - here Netflix wants to see how fast you can stream from their "built-out network and well placed CDNs" so testing those is completely relevant. For their purposes, testing a bunch of unoptimized and unrelated services would be "junk".
- niftich 10y ago> here Netflix wants to see how fast you can stream from their [CDNs] Absolutely right; but also in this case, Netflix' and the average downloader's needs align, given that the bulk (by share of bytes) of legal speed-sensitive downstream traffic is video.
- netinstructions 10y agoGoogle / YouTube has a 'Video Quality Report' which will measure your speeds and will also show local ISPs speeds as well. https://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/ https://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/
- parennoob 10y agoI don't see numerical speeds there, just a graph of how much SD and HD video is used across various ISPs in my neighborhood. Are you getting actual numbers like "100Mbps" from that report?
- blakeyrat 10y ago"Reports from your location are not available yet." Uh, I didn't tell you my location, Google... what the heck?
- fizzbatter 10y agoRe:#1, I'd like to see some type of software we can install in our stacks, to publicly publish speed data in a standardized format for real data. Can you imagine `test.youtube.com`, `test.netflix.com` and `test.vimeo.com`? Hell, imagine how nice it would be for gamers? Having trouble with your ping? `test.csgo.com` (or whatever CounterStrikes domain is.. a popular FPS), and etc. I'm firmly untrusting of Comcast's results on speedtest.. If Comcast is intentionally throttling, it's in their interest to not throttle Speedtest. However if we can monitor real data.. that actually seems useful. I understand that would likely require additional resources from video/etc providers, and is likely an unrealistic request from video/etc providers.. but i definitely don't need more test sites for Comcast to manipulate. Disclaimer: I don't know the subject domain, so apologies if i'm insanely off base.
- forcer 10y agoWe display our data publicly on the map. http://www.broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk/broadband_speed_in_my_area_v2.aspx http://www.broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk/broadband_speed_in_my... Granted we do not have many results in the US (maybe ballpark 200k+ results in last 6 months), still you should be able to find some results in your area.
- dmix 10y ago200k is a pretty good sample size is it not? Even with multiple providers. Most election/political polls use far less data and very big decisions get made because of them.
- hueving 10y agoSample size is only a tiny part of the relevance of a sample. You can take a thousand gallons of water to test water quality, but if all of it is from the same faucet the sample isn't representative.
- dmix 10y agoI don't see how that applies here though. How much variation is there among broadband users that matters?
- swasheck 10y agoRE #2: fast.com has me at 1/3 of what speedtest.net has me for download.
- pbreit 10y agoTesting for speed is great and all but is there an app or something that can monitor my Mac's end-to-end connectivity to an internet source? Like, I feel like my connectivity is spotty but am not sure if it's Wifi, Comcast or other.
- toomuchtodo 10y agoTrial/paid: https://www.pingplotter.com/download/mac/ https://www.pingplotter.com/download/mac/ Free/dockerized: https://hub.docker.com/r/dperson/smokeping/ https://hub.docker.com/r/dperson/smokeping/
- bluedino 10y agoTry mtr, it's like a combination ping/traceroute
- jordanthoms 10y agoTry https://github.com/apenwarr/blip https://github.com/apenwarr/blip - built by google fiber guys for exactly this.
- cenan 10y agohttp://pingspeedtest.com http://pingspeedtest.com
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- tener 10y agoSpeed testing is a good starting point, but on my LTE connection (rural area) I find the latency to be very contributor to overall experience. Especially that once the link is saturated the latency shoots through the roof (up to x10). I wish there were some tools for testing more complex use cases.
- m1r3k 10y agoSounds like bufferbloat to me. Tried using smart queue management like fq_codel on your end? Or is it an overloaded LTE cell?
- tener 10y agoNot sure if bufferbloat, but happens across multiple machines and system versions (I can saturate the link with one machine, the others will still suffer). But it may be an issue with the LTE router. I don't think I can do anything about it as it is totally locked down by the ISP.
- djrogers 10y agoLatency is largely irrelevant to one-way video streaming (at least until it's so high it affects throughput), and since Netflix designed this to test your speed for their one-way video streaming service I think leaving out latency testing is reasonable.
- infereque 10y agoLatency is critically important... You can easily determine how much of a problem it is in your case by calculating your bandwidth delay product: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwidth-delay_product https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwidth-delay_product
- djrogers 10y agoIn the real world TCP window scaling solves latency induced delays for video streaming in all but the most extreme cases (hence my caveat), and endpoint buffering can solve even those. For many activities on the internet a 1,000ms latency would be intolerable, but for one-way video streaming it's unnoticeable to the end user. I don't really care if a packet containing video takes 50ms or 1000ms to get from the CDN to my TV, as long as it gets there and is reasonably consistent in it's ability to do so. For this use case, if my machine can get 20Mb/s on the test, latency will just not affect me streaming a 10Mb/s video. Latency may be lowering my test results, but that's the point here - testing the effective throughput.
- greenspot 10y agoFirst, I thought why another speed test, then I saw that they link their results directly to speedtest.net (the reference) and finally, I realized that fast.com is so much faster in detecting the download speed (but lacks upload and ping). Not bad. EDIT: And they secured a fantastic domain.
- vicda 10y agoAlso, I'd imagine it's a way for them to fight back against providers capping download speeds to Netflix's content.
- twinkletwinkle 10y agoI think the point was they conduct the speed test from the same servers that deliver video content. So ISPs can't throttle video streaming without it showing up in this speed test.
- greenspot 10y agoMakes sense but wouldn't they then use the netflix domain? Something like netflix.com/fast? I could image that if providers throttle it would be a mix of IPs and domain.
- chrishacken 10y agoSome ISP's (we don't throttle anything) throttle based on several factors, mainly packet signatures. Traffic coming from big/known sources, such as Netflix, contain unique signatures (probably the headers, etc, that are unique to Netflix Traffic). You can then check all incoming packets that match those signatures and throttle them. So unless Netflix went out of their way to mask every request to look like video content, there's not a whole lot you could do.
- IceyEC 10y agoThe files that fast.com has you download ARE chunks of video files :)
- mofle 10y agoYou can also run fast.com from the command-line: https://github.com/sindresorhus/fast-cli https://github.com/sindresorhus/fast-cli
- joeblau 10y agoThis is cool; just ran it, but I couldn't tell that it was doing anything. Maybe adding some soft of indicator/throbber that lets you know it's processing. fast | cat 860 Mbps
- mofle 10y agoIt shows an animated spinner if you don't redirect the output.
- joeblau 10y agoAh okay awesome! Thanks.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mi100hael 10y agoWhy are you redirecting the output of the script which would otherwise be printed to a program that does nothing but print the output?
- corobo 10y agoBest guess is because it's what the --help says to do if you just glance at it $ fast --help Usage $ fast $ fast > file Example $ fast | cat 90 Mbps
- fidz 10y agoI am impressed that Phantom could do almost everything https://github.com/sindresorhus/fast-cli/blob/master/api.js#L34 https://github.com/sindresorhus/fast-cli/blob/master/api.js#...
- cocoflunchy 10y agoFast.com is a lot slower than both speedtest.net and http://speedtest.dslreports.com/speedtest http://speedtest.dslreports.com/speedtest for me... I get 78mbps on fast.com and 350 on the other two. Not sure what's going on? Maybe they don't have servers near me, I'm in Paris, France.
- doomtop 10y agoPerhaps that is a reflection of your provider's ability to serve bandwidth to Netflix servers?
- greenspot 10y agoMy results were similar on DSL: Speedtest 12.6 Mbps Fast.com 13.0 Mbps But differed on LTE: Speedtest 40.0 Mbps Fast.com 73.0 Mbps
- peyton 10y agoOne possibility is ISP skimping on peering and transit. Had that issue with an old ISP in Switzerland.
- JOnAgain 10y agoMine is actually faster on fast.com. About 140 on fast and 128 on speedtest. Yay.
- sjtgraham 10y agoMaybe your ISP is generally throttling your traffic but whitelisting speedtest et al to hide it.
- the_mitsuhiko 10y agoMore likely your ISP is cheating and you don't actually reach 350 outside speedtest and some other routes they make sure you are unthrottled on. Would not be the first.
- cocoflunchy 10y agoMaybe they throttle Netflix yes... I do get 350mbps on every other test and when downloading a test torrent though.
- Buge 10y agoI seem to be unable to view the blog post in Firefox, it automatically goes to https which doesn't load. Maybe netflix messed up their HSTS settings at some point in the past?
- cpeterso 10y agoAre you using HTTPS Everywhere? The Netflix blog post defaults to http for me. If I manually change to https, then it fails to load, as you describe.
- Buge 10y agoNo, I don't have it installed. But by testing addons, I figured out that Noscript is causing it. It's weird because in its settings, there is nothing in the "force https website" list, and the "forbid http" section is set to never.
- cpeterso 10y agoI just installed NoScript and I can reproduce the problem you see. :(
- ajamesm 10y agoI'm also experiencing the same (also using HTTPS everywhere). Disabling the extension doesn't seem to work. If you get a solution, please let me know.
- Buge 10y agoI found that Noscript was causing it. The best solution is to go into Noscript options > advanced > HTTPS and add .netflix.com to "Never force secure". The other way is to go into about:config and set noscript.httpsDefWhitelist to false. But that's less secure.
- __david__ 10y agoAhhh! Thank you! That was my problem as well. I didn't even know NoScript was doing that. >:-(
- zackbloom 10y agoIt's a little odd that they elected to invent their own way of requesting just a range of bytes in a file. It's built into HTTP: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7233 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7233
- douglasfshearer 10y agoYouTube also put the byte range in the URL rather than using a range request header. Perhaps it mitigates against proxies stripping the headers, or it simplifies caching.
- tyre 10y agoyou can also send a link that way (e.g. via email/Slack.) No way to send a link with an http header
- a1k0n 10y agoI tried to use the Range header feature to resume downloads in an autoupdating app once, and it worked beautifully...for about 90% of users; the others had all kinds of weird issues thanks to transparent proxies and caches not handling the Range header correctly. This was years ago, but I'm not surprised they chose to be safer than sorry.
- JoshTriplett 10y ago> I tried to use the Range header feature to resume downloads in an autoupdating app once, and it worked beautifully...for about 90% of users; the others had all kinds of weird issues thanks to transparent proxies and caches not handling the Range header correctly. One of many reasons to use HTTPS: prevent tampering with your requests and responses.
- zeta0134 10y agoYoutube recently did a writeup on their long road to HTTPS: http://youtube-eng.blogspot.com/2016/08/youtubes-road-to-https.html http://youtube-eng.blogspot.com/2016/08/youtubes-road-to-htt... I find it particularly telling that switching to HTTPS caused many streaming errors to mysteriously vanish, and I suspect ISP / proxy tampering to be part of the cause. I'd love to know more about what their engineers saw though.
- macandcheese 10y agoGreat example of engineering as marketing.
- djhworld 10y agoMy parents recently had 100mbps fibre installed, I told them to visit fast.com to test their speed and they were pleased at how easy it is to use and hassle free Good work by Netflix.
- comick 10y agoI see this as a tool for netflix to immediately raise concerns about ISP neutrality. The link to another speed test (using some minor server) is there not by chance. If speed test is far better than netflix fast.com the ISP is clearly limiting the customer.
- hardtke 10y agoI wish that my ISP (Comcast) would throttle Netflix in the evening. My internet bandwidth gets reduced to 200 kbps during prime time (roughly 9 to 11 PM). It makes it challenging to work, especially if I need to stay connected to a VPN.
- yazaddaruvala 10y agoIf you were wishing, why not wish for your ISP to aptly judge its peek traffic and scale its infrastructure?
- rfc791 10y agoSeveral years ago I used this wonderful tool. http://software.internet2.edu/ndt/ http://software.internet2.edu/ndt/. It provides the ability to do lots of troubleshooting in a private network.
- nippoo 10y agoThis is beautiful. By using Netflix's actual CDN and requesting actual video files over HTTP, they're preventing ISPs from whitelisting fast.com without also whitelisting Netflix itself. Of course there'll be a game of cat-and-mouse with DPI, but it's a super-neat way of making it much harder for the ISPs to misrepresent actual video download speed...
- davidsawyer 10y agoWow, I hadn't thought of that before! That really is genius.
- IshKebab 10y agoYeah right. Just wait until a user visits fast.com and unthrottle their connection for 20 minutes. I strongly suspect some ISPs already do that with speedtest.net.
- jonknee 10y agoWell the same tech could be built into Netflix apps on various devices, no web visit necessary. They also made a command-line tool available.
- BurningFrog 10y agoStill a win for Netflix.
- nkozyra 10y agoNote to self: set up cronjob to ping speedtest.net and fast.com every 10 minutes, just in case.
- figgis 10y agoI did that, works great and with speed test cli it (did it without that at first) it's even better! https://github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli https://github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli If you are going to setup a cronjob/service for it, I suggest using the --simple flag.
- daenney 10y agoLooks like I've hit a case of IPv4 vs. IPv6. I recently noticed that fast.com starting showing me at about half my connection speed, 50Mbps. I only just now realised while looking at the traffic that it was doing it over IPv6. Disabling IPv6 in my network gets me a reported speed of 120Mbps on fast.com, which sounds about right for a 100/100 subscription + some burst. My ISP hasn't even officially announced any IPv6 support, I discovered more or less by accident that if I enabled 6rd things "just worked" so the fact that it might not go at the full speed of my subscription isn't something I'm super worried about. I've actually got a similar issue with Google. While using IPv4 I don't even leave my ISP's network as they have those Google Global Cache boxes at the edge and terminate my connection there but over IPv6 I do go all the way out over the internet to Google.
- developer2 10y agoChances are you are not running native IPv6. Most customers who "have access to IPv6" are running through IPv4 -> IPv6 conversion which adds immense overhead and is not a real indication of IPv6 to come. For all such customers, their pseudo-IPv6 will always be slower than IPv4. Most ISPs do not run any form of native IPv6 yet.
- daenney 10y ago> Chances are you are not running native IPv6. Yes, that's the case since, as I stated, I got IPv6 connectivity through 6rd: > It is derived from 6to4, a preexisting mechanism to transfer IPv6 packets over the IPv4 network
- Citrus2fizz 10y agoHows this for a discrepancy https://i.imgur.com/7SX2Wro.png https://i.imgur.com/7SX2Wro.png
- stronglikedan 10y agoThat's nuts! Does that indicate that your ISP is playing games? I get an insignificant discrepancy: 91 on Fast and 91.99 on Speedtest.
- inputcoffee 10y agoI get 72 (fast.com) vs 92 (speedtest)
- imglorp 10y agoBastards!
- virtuallynathan 10y agoThis is a bit of an unfair test, as it is not in Netflix's best interest to provision enough CDN capacity for any user to hit 1Gbps, especially at peak times. Netflix wants to buy/provision just enough capacity so that users don't complain. Depending on the distribution of the users in the area, this could 5Mbps per user, or 15Mbps per user for a large amount of 4K streamers. Netflix pushes their CDN nodes to the limit, 60-70Gbps per box for video. Speedtests don't make them money, so why provision capacity for it?
- randartie 10y agoWhat's stopping ISPs from slowing down other speedtests at the same rate as netflix to eliminate your ability to have a 'control'?
- dpcx 10y agoYou can have any "control" you want by setting up your own "speedtest" mirror. It's hard to stop all of them.
- scott_karana 10y agoWouldn't your results show as being dramatically lower than your purchased speeds, then? That would backfire in a hurry :)
- manish_gill 10y agoI wish people would believe this. I had an hour long fight with my ISP the other day - the customer support people are provided with a script that they have to follow, and I'm trying to tell them that the speed isn't as good as they claimed it was. It got to the point where I was sharing screen with them on TeamViewer to show them the download speed I was getting. Their response? "We use SpeedTest.net as standard, it must be a problem with the servers that you are using".
- mshenfield 10y agoThis does something good by providing a nice service for a common and difficult to answer question, and also seems like a smart strategic use of Netlix's resources. The net result of applying their capital, engineering talent and existing infrastructure here: a positive recruiting impact for engineers, a positive branding impact for consumers visiting fast.com, and Netflix obtains information about internet speeds for IPs that are not currently Netflix customers, information that many businesses would find useful for things like determining the market for high bandwidth applications.
- e28eta 10y agoI'm getting a consistent difference between fast.com in Safari on iPad vs their Fast app (90-ish vs 65-ish, across 5 interleaved trials). I was hoping for better measurement in the native app, but I suspect it might just be a web view in a native shell. Anyone else seeing similar results? I think this is an interesting idea, but I'm not convinced it'll actually make a difference. From the consumer side, there's nothing to say that the slowest link isn't Netflix's CDN when a discrepancy occurs between Fast and Speedtest. I was receiving atrocious download speeds for movies from iTunes (18+ hours for 4 GB), and also saw slow speeds from speakeasy.net/speedtest. The comcast rep just pointed me at Speedtest and said "it's not a problem with your connection, it's fast! Contact Apple." He dismissed the "other" speed testing results. ISPs can continue to throttle directly or by refusing to upgrade peering connections. fast.com providing a number to go along with bad Netflix streaming quality doesn't improve the customer's life. What I really want is something that empowers me to be heard in my request for the $75 worth of Internet that I pay for every month. I had high hopes that the SamKnows program might yield something, until I received a docsis 3 cable modem in the mail from Comcast with a note: "since you're a participant in SamKnows monitoring, we sent you this upgraded modem so you can take advantage of better speeds". My first thought was "what about all of your customers who aren't participating in SamKnows? When do they receive their 'upgrades'?" Do we really need the government monitoring everyone's broadband performance to ensure that companies are delivering?
- pavs 10y agoI wonder if Netflix makes it as easy to apply for their local CDN nodes as google does with GGC. I know akamai is super difficult to apply for and get admitted. Ever since Netflix became available in our country we have been hurting BW wise. We don't throttle BW for any sites. Does anyone here have any experience with open connect (Netflix)?
- firloop 10y agoIt doesn't seem terribly difficult so long as you have the traffic numbers to support it (peak traffic of 5gbps) and enough bandwidth for the box to fill its cache during off peak hours. https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/requirements-for-deploying/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/requirements-for-deployin...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- newscracker 10y agoUnfortunately, it doesn't work for me behind a proxy (tried with three different browsers). I thought I'd just check it out (https://fast.com https://fast.com - trying http redirects to https anyway), but it says: "Could not reach our servers to perform the test. You may not be connected to the internet" P.S.: It also bugs me that it says "the internet" and not "the Internet". :)
- rahulgulati 10y ago:D AP and other publishers don't recommend capitalising 'internet' and 'web'. "The changes reflect a growing trend toward lowercasing both words, which have become generic terms" http://www.poynter.org/2016/ap-style-change-alert-dont-capitalize-internet-and-web-any-more/404664/ http://www.poynter.org/2016/ap-style-change-alert-dont-capit...
- aidenn0 10y agoApparently my ISP upgraded my speeds; I tested at 170Mbps and when I last checked my plan it was 80Mbps. In general, I've been quite happy with Cox. The actual network service is great. Customer service and pricing are so-so (I'm paying $60/mo. for the above connection; customer service is very hit-or-miss depending on which representative I get, but I haven't been outright lied to).
- Morpheus79 10y agoNice and I think they really benefit on their existing infrastructure. But tests shows 5mbits for me and all other 30+ (real). So not really a great help till now.
- breakingcups 10y ago"In pursuit of the design goal of simplicity, we deliberately chose to measure only download speed, measuring how fast data travels from server to consumer when they are performing activities such as viewing web pages or streaming video. Downloads represent the majority of activity for most internet consumers." I'm willing to bet additional factors that went into that consideration were: - Netflix gets massive download traffic on the cheap due to their scale. Upload, not so much - This tool is a clever way of preventing providers from throttling Netflix servers without also throttling a (hopfully soon to be) popular speedtest. Uploading isn't something they need their primary customers to be able to do.