12 ms·

Fast.com now measures latency and upload speed

200 points by kumaranvpl 8y ago

sz4kerto 8y ago
Except fast.com doesn't as many locations as speedtest.net; so the best I can get with fast.com is ~250 Mbps, while speedtest.net measures 900 Mbps.
- alphabettsy 8y ago
  Idk if you noticed, but with Speedtest.net often times you’re testing against an ISP-run or sponsored server so it’s hardly an accurate portrait of speeds with a typical service.
  - magicalhippo 8y ago
    But you can select servers yourself. So I usually use the auto-selected server (sitting at my ISP or similar) to check local conditions such as is my cable modem or router/firewall doing fine or not. If I want to test "usable" bandwidth, I'll select a few servers in other, far-away cities like Amsterdam, Miami etc.
  - fuzzy2 8y ago
    But that depends on what you’re trying to test. If you want to test your DSL/cable/fiber connection (and nothing else), it’s actually good if the ISP is hosting the test server. If you want to measure the speed you’ll realistically experience in the wild, including your ISP’s peerings and whatnot, that’s another question.
- jmiserez 8y ago
  Doesn’t it measure from the same locations as Netflix is delivered? I think that was the whole point of the service?
- Aaargh20318 8y ago
  The main problem seems to be it’s HTML/JS based and just can’t keep up with high download speeds. Same goes for speedtest.net. Speedtest has a desktop app which doesn’t suffer from this issue.
  - heartbreak 8y ago
    I have well over a gigabit download speed on fast.com just now. I think it can keep up just fine.
    - Aaargh20318 8y ago
      It craps out at around 500Mbit on Safari/MacOS. Same on Chrome. The stand alone speedtest app goes up to >900 Mbit just fine. It randomly freezes during the test for seconds at a time, presumably the JS GC is triggered. To be fair, I do have about 150 tabs open.
ulfw 8y ago
So then it’s like Ookla Speedtest?
- taspeotis 8y ago
  Some ISPs might prioritize traffic to Ookla (or its mirrors) which makes the ISP look better than they really are. With FAST.com you can see if your ISP throttles traffic to Netflix in any way, which is desirable for the ISP but undesirable for you.
  - ulfw 8y ago
    Cool. So fast.com can't have traffic prioritised to it's domain? Shouldn't it better be fast.netflix.com or something?
    - detaro 8y ago
      Fast.com doesn't measure the speed to stuff behind fast.com, it measures the speed to Netflix CDN nodes.
    - corobo 8y ago
      If they prioritised traffic to fast.com then real production Netflix video traffic would also be prioritised Fast.com is just a nice domain to put it on. It could be fast.netflix.com or anything, it just loads the code to kick off the test
    - badwolf 8y ago
      fast.com uses video data from ntflxvideo.net
      - ulfw 8y ago
        Great. That makes sense then. Thank you!
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
reacharavindh 8y ago
Is there a commandline version of it I can use on a public facing server to test it's network bandwidth/latency from different parts of the world? Specific case: Our SSH server accessed by users from all around the world. It'd be nice to know the bandwidth & latencies our users get.
- marclittlemore 8y ago
  Sindre Sorhus has written a Node wrapper for it which might be useful for you. https://github.com/sindresorhus/fast-cli https://github.com/sindresorhus/fast-cli
  - Aissen 8y ago
    I've also used Gus Esquivel's go version, it works quite well: https://github.com/gesquive/fast-cli https://github.com/gesquive/fast-cli
- tombrossman 8y ago
  You may have seen this already, but there is a Python utility that works with Speedtest.net called "speedtest-cli". pip install speedtest-cli https://github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli https://github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli
- kalleboo 8y ago
  I use iperf3 to test the connection speed between nodes I control.
- ryaneager 8y ago
  https://github.com/sanderjo/fast.com https://github.com/sanderjo/fast.com
lazharichir 8y ago
Works great! https://cdn.pbrd.co/images/HuZPvRU.png https://cdn.pbrd.co/images/HuZPvRU.png
headmelted 8y ago
The problem with this is that Fast.com is owned by Netflix, which is such a significant consumer of bandwidth that it inclines ISPs to shape traffic to fudge the numbers. Essentially, this kind of speed test only really tells you what the maximum bandwidth your ISP is able to provide you is, rather than what they're really providing. Even then, the test result with Fast.com could be subject to traffic shaping or slowdown at the remote end, so what is the result really telling you at all? In fairness, this would be true of any popular speed test, and I'm not sure of an obvious solution. Any kind of tunneling or onion routing would render the test pointless anyway, so I'm not sure of the extent to which you can ever really trust a speed test of this nature. The only really useful data for this kind of analysis is likely to come from a router with sufficiently sophisticated software that it can report on transfer rates over time (which many do), and even then, that doesn't account for scenarios where the remote connection is the bottleneck.
- nothrabannosir 8y ago
  That’s a feature, not a bug. It was originally created in the context of the net neutrality debate. This allows you to see if your ISP is cheating you on Netflix bandwidth, supposedly in order to push their own media-on-demand product. It was introduced after reports of ISPs doing just that, and it was Netflix’ way of hitting back.
  - headmelted 8y ago
    Is Netflix sending the video data from Fast.com, though? If not then they could very well be fudging the numbers for Fast.com and not Netflix proper. It may not be common or even legal in the US (I really don't know), but in the UK traffic shaping is commonplace, even in instances where the package has been described as "Unlimited".
    - nothrabannosir 8y ago
      Yes, open the debug console and see for yourself ;) ...ntflxvideo.net ...ntflxvideo.net ...ntflxvideo.net ...ntflxvideo.net etc.
XparentX 8y ago
In Sweden we have ”Bredbandskollem” since around 2007 and with a mobile app since 2008. Not so many details, but it works. It’s supported by IIS (Internetstiftelsen I Sverige) which is responsible for .se among other things. Fast.com - is 10Mb normal for 4G mobile connection?
abhiminator 8y ago
This is great! Fast.com has been my go-to site for speed-tests and sometimes for even rudimentary connectivity check. It dethroned speedtest.net as my primary speed-test service for two reasons: 1) I find typing 'fast.com' much easier and hassle-free than typing speedtest.net (aside from the fact that quick '.com' insertion through CTRL+Enter shortcut in Firefox makes it even snappier). 2) Netflix's wide self-run server network gives more uniform results, especially when testing from different continents, because 3rd party server providers -- in the case of Speedtest.net -- have sub-par performance, imo. This feature is a welcome addition.
dsr_ 8y ago
Interesting point: fast.com prefers my IPv6 connection, which is through a Hurricane Electric tunnel that Netflix won't serve. As a diagnostic for Netflix, that makes this useless.
- detaro 8y ago
  It measures the speed against actual Netflix CDN servers, so how can it "prefer your IPv6 connection" for the speed measurement?
  - dsr_ 8y ago
    I have IPv4 from my ISP, and a Hurricane Electric tunnel to provide IPv6, because my ISP is lame. (Hello, Verizon FIOS.) Netflix prefers IPv6. However, they have blacklisted the Hurricane Electric endpoints, because their paying customers with valid accounts might use those endpoints to view the content that they paid for while sitting in another country. The blacklist does not take effect until you try to actually get video content from Netflix, at which point an error is returned. The result of all this is that fast.com measures the speed of my IPv6 tunnel to Netflix CDN servers, which will not serve content. I have to turn off IPv6 routing on boxes in my house that want to watch Netflix, and then it falls back to IPv4... a completely different path than the one fast.com has just measured.
    - detaro 8y ago
      Oh, interesting failure case.
mikerg87 8y ago
Can someone explain the difference between loaded and unloaded latency ?
- krallja 8y ago
  https://www.bufferbloat.net/ https://www.bufferbloat.net/
- tgb 8y ago
  Bufferbloat.net talks about this. The problem is that many home routers do a poor job allocating their resources so if I'm streaming video and you're VOIPing, your latency will go up dramatically since my download is pushing you out. In reality there's enough bandwidth for both of us, but it's getting used poorly. On my setup, loaded latency was over one second (to google.com) compared to under 50ms for unloaded! (Fast.com gives more mild numbers for loaded latency than I observed manually.)
- aesh2Xa1 8y ago
  https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/fast-com-now-measures-latency-and-upload-speed https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/fast-com-now-measu...
- richbhanover 8y ago
  Latency is a measure of how long it takes a packet to go from your computer to some other computer and back. People usually measure this by a ping test Unloaded latency (when there isn't much traffic on your connection through your link to the ISP) generally ranges from 5 msec to 50 msec, depending on what kind of connection you have (fiber, cable, dsl, cellular). Loaded latency is measured when there is traffic on the link. A good router will minimize the additional latency, but many routers will add a lot - between two and five seconds (2000 to 5000 msec). That's why you lag out in games. In addition to the new Fast.com test, there are good tools for measuring loaded latency listed on the Bufferbloat page: https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/bloat/wiki/Tests_for_Bufferbloat/ https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/bloat/wiki/Tests_for_Bu...
vladdanilov 8y ago
Why is it not a browser feature? Transferred 175MB just to measure the speed. Good it does not do it at 3G speeds. There are also 156KB of images waiting to be compressed to one third of that [1]. [1] https://i.imgur.com/34SWfzo.png https://i.imgur.com/34SWfzo.png
coatmatter 8y ago
https://speedof.me https://speedof.me remains my favourite, although I still find myself using Speedtest at times because that's what everyone else uses and it's useful to pick a server that others are testing between on any given day. Also, there are more links and alternatives under this discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/5mntko/other_alternatives_to_speedtestnet/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/5mntko/other_alte... Ultimately in most cases, I just want to know whether my connection is working or not. If it's working, it'll usually be in a certain ballpark. If it's not (or if I've accidentally left a VPN on), it's obvious.
- MrEldritch 8y ago
  I prefer https://testmy.net https://testmy.net, personally. It's supposed to be more accurate.
- woofcat 8y ago
  My problem is that speedof.me seems to be on Amazon EC2 in a US West data center. So for me on the East coast it's not really measuring my internet access, it's measuring my internet access across the whole country. So using speedof.me I get a result of around 100Mbps. Using Speedtest.net within my own city it's around 700Mbps. Using Speakeasy with a Eastern server it's around 400Mbps speedtest.googlefiber.net to Kansas comes in at around 300Mbps. So in my opinion the speedtest you should be using is entirely based on who has servers closest to you physically.
  - kalleboo 8y ago
    Ironically, speedof.me is using a server in my country and gets 90 Mbps, and speedtest.googlefiber.net is using a server in Los Angeles and gets 150 Mbps. Peering is weird. I'd love a speedtest that tests to whatever node you're using on all biggest CDNs (CloudFront, CloudFlare, Akamai, Google, etc)
    - pavs 8y ago
      The problem with peering is that cross country peering can cost a lot of money. So if netflix does not have any caching server in your country, they will have to pull bandwidth from the closest location and your isp might have limited peering agreement with that provider. Which many ISP understansibly will refuse to icrease peering capacity and you end up with poor bw speed from netflix or other similar providers. The solution is to do what google does with GGC nodes. Netflix also has similar service but the are very stringent and picky with which ISP they give the servers to. Google basically gives them away to almost whoever asks for it. Not to mention with all streaming and cdn and cloud providers wanting to have their own ggc like hardware at ISP premise it puts cost strains to isp in terms of power usage, rack space and high-output switch and routers at the distribution end. Not to mention all of these hardware will pull bandwidth from source (about 20%) which will come through ISPs expense. People often like to blame ISPs. While big ISPs have legitimate problems. It also makes it extremely difficult for smaller isps bear this cost and provide service parity compare to ISP giants. Which is why you don't see a lot of isp business popping up. There is a reason google fibre is so limited in scope. It always facinates me how most ISPs makes money at all. Then i realize the one who do has been doing it for a long time ans were already big companies when started out and probably had to take substantial loans and help from government and even then it probably took them a long time to be profitable.
madspindel 8y ago
Awesome! But they should add PWA support so you can add it to iOS home screen.
- 1123581321 8y ago
  You already can in the share sheet. I have had it on my home screen for a couple years. It has the right kind of icon, too.
zkms 8y ago
Thank you so very much for providing latency-under-load statistics; this is excellent.
iambateman 8y ago
Well, I'm getting 10-14mbps down from Fast.com and 50mbps down (as advertised) on speedtest. Looks like Netflix is indeed being throttled here. What's interesting is that we haven't noticed any issues with speed while watching netflix.
- jplayer01 8y ago
  What are your speeds on unrelated downloads? Without any other data points, one could also make the assumption that Speedtest speeds are being fudged by your ISP, while fast.com is showing your real bandwidth.
  - tombh 8y ago
    Which I believe is the whole point of fast.com - to give you a more realistic measure of your actual bandwidth.
Ajedi32 8y ago
Interesting. When I check the "Measure loaded latency during upload" option my Loaded Latency value goes up by about two orders of magnitude. Is there a way to fix this? Seems like there ought to be some sort of traffic shaping measures I could apply at my firewall (I've got a dedicated box running pfSense) to ensure low-latency applications get sufficient bandwidth during upload.
- mastax 8y ago
  This issue is generally called "buffer bloat". That keyword should help you find solutions. I think it's generally QoS to limit aggregate upload bandwidth to less than your available so the buffers don't get (over-)filled in the first place.
razster 8y ago
How come there isn't a speed test site that test closest and furthest away servers and averages them?
kwindla 8y ago
As a couple of other folks have noted, lots of ISPs prioritize traffic to (some) known speed test sites, so differing results from different speed tests -- and results that differ from real world experience -- are pretty common. Even weirder, sometimes this traffic prioritization happens partly in the firmware of the modem the ISP provides. On one of our test network connections, we can reliably trigger a firmware issue in the router that causes very high packet loss. Then we can "fix" the issue by visiting www.speedtest.net from any computer on the LAN behind the modem. (My company makes in-browser video calling stuff, so we spend a lot of time worrying about network connectivity.) And speaking of packet loss, I'd love to see Netflix add a measurement for UDP packet loss at several throughput levels. There's no easy way for non-technical users to do a really good packet loss test. We often get customer support queries that say something like, "My video calls are terrible but it's not a network issue because I did a speed test and I'm getting 100Mbs." Which is a totally reasonable thing to say. But when we look at call data, the person is experiencing regular spikes of, say, 15% packet loss. That's not something that will effect web browsing noticeably, or even Netflix video very much, but it makes for really frustrating video calls.
- StudentStuff 8y ago
  Have you tried the DSLReports Speedtest? I've found it very helpful in diagnosing latent but not obvious network issues: https://www.dslreports.com/speedtest https://www.dslreports.com/speedtest
observer12 8y ago
I still say the greatest trick the ISPs ever performed was getting customers and content providers to both pay. I don't mean simply the content providers internet bill I mean backbone providers and large orgs like Google and Netflix paying to connect with an ISP. They double dip already and with net neutrality gone they can now make even more by charging both for "premium" services on top of regular charges.

200 points by kumaranvpl 8y ago

Except fast.com doesn't as many locations as speedtest.net; so the best I can get with fast.com is ~250 Mbps, while speedtest.net measures 900 Mbps.

alphabettsy 8y ago
Idk if you noticed, but with Speedtest.net often times you’re testing against an ISP-run or sponsored server so it’s hardly an accurate portrait of speeds with a typical service.
- magicalhippo 8y ago
  But you can select servers yourself. So I usually use the auto-selected server (sitting at my ISP or similar) to check local conditions such as is my cable modem or router/firewall doing fine or not. If I want to test "usable" bandwidth, I'll select a few servers in other, far-away cities like Amsterdam, Miami etc.
- fuzzy2 8y ago
  But that depends on what you’re trying to test. If you want to test your DSL/cable/fiber connection (and nothing else), it’s actually good if the ISP is hosting the test server. If you want to measure the speed you’ll realistically experience in the wild, including your ISP’s peerings and whatnot, that’s another question.
jmiserez 8y ago
Doesn’t it measure from the same locations as Netflix is delivered? I think that was the whole point of the service?
Aaargh20318 8y ago
The main problem seems to be it’s HTML/JS based and just can’t keep up with high download speeds. Same goes for speedtest.net. Speedtest has a desktop app which doesn’t suffer from this issue.
- heartbreak 8y ago
  I have well over a gigabit download speed on fast.com just now. I think it can keep up just fine.
  - Aaargh20318 8y ago
    It craps out at around 500Mbit on Safari/MacOS. Same on Chrome. The stand alone speedtest app goes up to >900 Mbit just fine. It randomly freezes during the test for seconds at a time, presumably the JS GC is triggered. To be fair, I do have about 150 tabs open.

ulfw 8y ago

So then it’s like Ookla Speedtest?

taspeotis 8y ago
Some ISPs might prioritize traffic to Ookla (or its mirrors) which makes the ISP look better than they really are. With FAST.com you can see if your ISP throttles traffic to Netflix in any way, which is desirable for the ISP but undesirable for you.
- ulfw 8y ago
  Cool. So fast.com can't have traffic prioritised to it's domain? Shouldn't it better be fast.netflix.com or something?
  - detaro 8y ago
    Fast.com doesn't measure the speed to stuff behind fast.com, it measures the speed to Netflix CDN nodes.
  - corobo 8y ago
    If they prioritised traffic to fast.com then real production Netflix video traffic would also be prioritised Fast.com is just a nice domain to put it on. It could be fast.netflix.com or anything, it just loads the code to kick off the test
  - badwolf 8y ago
    fast.com uses video data from ntflxvideo.net
    - ulfw 8y ago
      Great. That makes sense then. Thank you!

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

reacharavindh 8y ago

Is there a commandline version of it I can use on a public facing server to test it's network bandwidth/latency from different parts of the world? Specific case: Our SSH server accessed by users from all around the world. It'd be nice to know the bandwidth & latencies our users get.

marclittlemore 8y ago
Sindre Sorhus has written a Node wrapper for it which might be useful for you. https://github.com/sindresorhus/fast-cli https://github.com/sindresorhus/fast-cli
- Aissen 8y ago
  I've also used Gus Esquivel's go version, it works quite well: https://github.com/gesquive/fast-cli https://github.com/gesquive/fast-cli
tombrossman 8y ago
You may have seen this already, but there is a Python utility that works with Speedtest.net called "speedtest-cli". pip install speedtest-cli https://github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli https://github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli
kalleboo 8y ago
I use iperf3 to test the connection speed between nodes I control.
ryaneager 8y ago
https://github.com/sanderjo/fast.com https://github.com/sanderjo/fast.com

lazharichir 8y ago

Works great! https://cdn.pbrd.co/images/HuZPvRU.png https://cdn.pbrd.co/images/HuZPvRU.png

headmelted 8y ago

The problem with this is that Fast.com is owned by Netflix, which is such a significant consumer of bandwidth that it inclines ISPs to shape traffic to fudge the numbers. Essentially, this kind of speed test only really tells you what the maximum bandwidth your ISP is able to provide you is, rather than what they're really providing. Even then, the test result with Fast.com could be subject to traffic shaping or slowdown at the remote end, so what is the result really telling you at all? In fairness, this would be true of any popular speed test, and I'm not sure of an obvious solution. Any kind of tunneling or onion routing would render the test pointless anyway, so I'm not sure of the extent to which you can ever really trust a speed test of this nature. The only really useful data for this kind of analysis is likely to come from a router with sufficiently sophisticated software that it can report on transfer rates over time (which many do), and even then, that doesn't account for scenarios where the remote connection is the bottleneck.

nothrabannosir 8y ago
That’s a feature, not a bug. It was originally created in the context of the net neutrality debate. This allows you to see if your ISP is cheating you on Netflix bandwidth, supposedly in order to push their own media-on-demand product. It was introduced after reports of ISPs doing just that, and it was Netflix’ way of hitting back.
- headmelted 8y ago
  Is Netflix sending the video data from Fast.com, though? If not then they could very well be fudging the numbers for Fast.com and not Netflix proper. It may not be common or even legal in the US (I really don't know), but in the UK traffic shaping is commonplace, even in instances where the package has been described as "Unlimited".
  - nothrabannosir 8y ago
    Yes, open the debug console and see for yourself ;) ...ntflxvideo.net ...ntflxvideo.net ...ntflxvideo.net ...ntflxvideo.net etc.

XparentX 8y ago

In Sweden we have ”Bredbandskollem” since around 2007 and with a mobile app since 2008. Not so many details, but it works. It’s supported by IIS (Internetstiftelsen I Sverige) which is responsible for .se among other things. Fast.com - is 10Mb normal for 4G mobile connection?

abhiminator 8y ago

This is great! Fast.com has been my go-to site for speed-tests and sometimes for even rudimentary connectivity check. It dethroned speedtest.net as my primary speed-test service for two reasons: 1) I find typing 'fast.com' much easier and hassle-free than typing speedtest.net (aside from the fact that quick '.com' insertion through CTRL+Enter shortcut in Firefox makes it even snappier). 2) Netflix's wide self-run server network gives more uniform results, especially when testing from different continents, because 3rd party server providers -- in the case of Speedtest.net -- have sub-par performance, imo. This feature is a welcome addition.

dsr_ 8y ago

Interesting point: fast.com prefers my IPv6 connection, which is through a Hurricane Electric tunnel that Netflix won't serve. As a diagnostic for Netflix, that makes this useless.

detaro 8y ago
It measures the speed against actual Netflix CDN servers, so how can it "prefer your IPv6 connection" for the speed measurement?
- dsr_ 8y ago
  I have IPv4 from my ISP, and a Hurricane Electric tunnel to provide IPv6, because my ISP is lame. (Hello, Verizon FIOS.) Netflix prefers IPv6. However, they have blacklisted the Hurricane Electric endpoints, because their paying customers with valid accounts might use those endpoints to view the content that they paid for while sitting in another country. The blacklist does not take effect until you try to actually get video content from Netflix, at which point an error is returned. The result of all this is that fast.com measures the speed of my IPv6 tunnel to Netflix CDN servers, which will not serve content. I have to turn off IPv6 routing on boxes in my house that want to watch Netflix, and then it falls back to IPv4... a completely different path than the one fast.com has just measured.
  - detaro 8y ago
    Oh, interesting failure case.

mikerg87 8y ago

Can someone explain the difference between loaded and unloaded latency ?

krallja 8y ago
https://www.bufferbloat.net/ https://www.bufferbloat.net/
tgb 8y ago
Bufferbloat.net talks about this. The problem is that many home routers do a poor job allocating their resources so if I'm streaming video and you're VOIPing, your latency will go up dramatically since my download is pushing you out. In reality there's enough bandwidth for both of us, but it's getting used poorly. On my setup, loaded latency was over one second (to google.com) compared to under 50ms for unloaded! (Fast.com gives more mild numbers for loaded latency than I observed manually.)
aesh2Xa1 8y ago
https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/fast-com-now-measures-latency-and-upload-speed https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/fast-com-now-measu...
richbhanover 8y ago
Latency is a measure of how long it takes a packet to go from your computer to some other computer and back. People usually measure this by a ping test Unloaded latency (when there isn't much traffic on your connection through your link to the ISP) generally ranges from 5 msec to 50 msec, depending on what kind of connection you have (fiber, cable, dsl, cellular). Loaded latency is measured when there is traffic on the link. A good router will minimize the additional latency, but many routers will add a lot - between two and five seconds (2000 to 5000 msec). That's why you lag out in games. In addition to the new Fast.com test, there are good tools for measuring loaded latency listed on the Bufferbloat page: https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/bloat/wiki/Tests_for_Bufferbloat/ https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/bloat/wiki/Tests_for_Bu...

vladdanilov 8y ago

Why is it not a browser feature? Transferred 175MB just to measure the speed. Good it does not do it at 3G speeds. There are also 156KB of images waiting to be compressed to one third of that [1]. [1] https://i.imgur.com/34SWfzo.png https://i.imgur.com/34SWfzo.png

coatmatter 8y ago

https://speedof.me https://speedof.me remains my favourite, although I still find myself using Speedtest at times because that's what everyone else uses and it's useful to pick a server that others are testing between on any given day. Also, there are more links and alternatives under this discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/5mntko/other_alternatives_to_speedtestnet/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/5mntko/other_alte... Ultimately in most cases, I just want to know whether my connection is working or not. If it's working, it'll usually be in a certain ballpark. If it's not (or if I've accidentally left a VPN on), it's obvious.

MrEldritch 8y ago
I prefer https://testmy.net https://testmy.net, personally. It's supposed to be more accurate.
woofcat 8y ago
My problem is that speedof.me seems to be on Amazon EC2 in a US West data center. So for me on the East coast it's not really measuring my internet access, it's measuring my internet access across the whole country. So using speedof.me I get a result of around 100Mbps. Using Speedtest.net within my own city it's around 700Mbps. Using Speakeasy with a Eastern server it's around 400Mbps speedtest.googlefiber.net to Kansas comes in at around 300Mbps. So in my opinion the speedtest you should be using is entirely based on who has servers closest to you physically.
- kalleboo 8y ago
  Ironically, speedof.me is using a server in my country and gets 90 Mbps, and speedtest.googlefiber.net is using a server in Los Angeles and gets 150 Mbps. Peering is weird. I'd love a speedtest that tests to whatever node you're using on all biggest CDNs (CloudFront, CloudFlare, Akamai, Google, etc)
  - pavs 8y ago
    The problem with peering is that cross country peering can cost a lot of money. So if netflix does not have any caching server in your country, they will have to pull bandwidth from the closest location and your isp might have limited peering agreement with that provider. Which many ISP understansibly will refuse to icrease peering capacity and you end up with poor bw speed from netflix or other similar providers. The solution is to do what google does with GGC nodes. Netflix also has similar service but the are very stringent and picky with which ISP they give the servers to. Google basically gives them away to almost whoever asks for it. Not to mention with all streaming and cdn and cloud providers wanting to have their own ggc like hardware at ISP premise it puts cost strains to isp in terms of power usage, rack space and high-output switch and routers at the distribution end. Not to mention all of these hardware will pull bandwidth from source (about 20%) which will come through ISPs expense. People often like to blame ISPs. While big ISPs have legitimate problems. It also makes it extremely difficult for smaller isps bear this cost and provide service parity compare to ISP giants. Which is why you don't see a lot of isp business popping up. There is a reason google fibre is so limited in scope. It always facinates me how most ISPs makes money at all. Then i realize the one who do has been doing it for a long time ans were already big companies when started out and probably had to take substantial loans and help from government and even then it probably took them a long time to be profitable.

madspindel 8y ago

Awesome! But they should add PWA support so you can add it to iOS home screen.

1123581321 8y ago
You already can in the share sheet. I have had it on my home screen for a couple years. It has the right kind of icon, too.

zkms 8y ago

Thank you so very much for providing latency-under-load statistics; this is excellent.

iambateman 8y ago

Well, I'm getting 10-14mbps down from Fast.com and 50mbps down (as advertised) on speedtest. Looks like Netflix is indeed being throttled here. What's interesting is that we haven't noticed any issues with speed while watching netflix.

jplayer01 8y ago
What are your speeds on unrelated downloads? Without any other data points, one could also make the assumption that Speedtest speeds are being fudged by your ISP, while fast.com is showing your real bandwidth.
- tombh 8y ago
  Which I believe is the whole point of fast.com - to give you a more realistic measure of your actual bandwidth.

Ajedi32 8y ago

Interesting. When I check the "Measure loaded latency during upload" option my Loaded Latency value goes up by about two orders of magnitude. Is there a way to fix this? Seems like there ought to be some sort of traffic shaping measures I could apply at my firewall (I've got a dedicated box running pfSense) to ensure low-latency applications get sufficient bandwidth during upload.

mastax 8y ago
This issue is generally called "buffer bloat". That keyword should help you find solutions. I think it's generally QoS to limit aggregate upload bandwidth to less than your available so the buffers don't get (over-)filled in the first place.

razster 8y ago

How come there isn't a speed test site that test closest and furthest away servers and averages them?

kwindla 8y ago

As a couple of other folks have noted, lots of ISPs prioritize traffic to (some) known speed test sites, so differing results from different speed tests -- and results that differ from real world experience -- are pretty common. Even weirder, sometimes this traffic prioritization happens partly in the firmware of the modem the ISP provides. On one of our test network connections, we can reliably trigger a firmware issue in the router that causes very high packet loss. Then we can "fix" the issue by visiting www.speedtest.net from any computer on the LAN behind the modem. (My company makes in-browser video calling stuff, so we spend a lot of time worrying about network connectivity.) And speaking of packet loss, I'd love to see Netflix add a measurement for UDP packet loss at several throughput levels. There's no easy way for non-technical users to do a really good packet loss test. We often get customer support queries that say something like, "My video calls are terrible but it's not a network issue because I did a speed test and I'm getting 100Mbs." Which is a totally reasonable thing to say. But when we look at call data, the person is experiencing regular spikes of, say, 15% packet loss. That's not something that will effect web browsing noticeably, or even Netflix video very much, but it makes for really frustrating video calls.

StudentStuff 8y ago
Have you tried the DSLReports Speedtest? I've found it very helpful in diagnosing latent but not obvious network issues: https://www.dslreports.com/speedtest https://www.dslreports.com/speedtest

observer12 8y ago

I still say the greatest trick the ISPs ever performed was getting customers and content providers to both pay. I don't mean simply the content providers internet bill I mean backbone providers and large orgs like Google and Netflix paying to connect with an ISP. They double dip already and with net neutrality gone they can now make even more by charging both for "premium" services on top of regular charges.