13 ms·

Speed.cloudflare.com

498 points by manigandham 6y ago

harias 6y ago
Warning: The website starts an internet speed test as soon as you click on the link.
- rkagerer 6y ago
  Good, that's why I went there. The name is fairly descriptive; it does what's advertised without any subterfuge. And there's a Pause button.
  - anonymousab 6y ago
    A lot of the commonly used speed tests have a start or Go button. This isn't bad behaviour, people just may not expect it based on what they are used to.
    - SamWhited 6y ago
      It's bad behavior if you're paying a lot for bandwidth…
  - capableweb 6y ago
    I thought it was gonna be a public dashboard of transfer bandwidth globally in the cloudflare network, so domain could have been more descriptive. How about "speedtest.cloudflare.com"?
  - gpm 6y ago
    Not good. I didn't click on the link because I was worried it might, but I almost did. If I had I would have probably brought at least one video conference to a halt.
- surround 6y ago
  And (as you might expect) Cloudflare collects and saves data from the test.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
MadVikingGod 6y ago
I'm seeing that my upload speed (90M) is way under both what is advertised, and what other speed tests show. Is there a good way to test what my actual upload speed is?
- drewg123 6y ago
  I see the same 90Mb/s as you, so I suspect they are capping at 90Mb/s. For another test, try fast.com and click "more info" after the download stops. I have fios 1Gb service. From clouldflare I see ~500Mb/s down and 90Mb/s up, and fast.com shows 600Mb/s down and 900Mb/s up.
  - dylanpyle 6y ago
    anecdotally - my results here show approximately the speed i'm paying for, which is higher than 90
- kube-system 6y ago
  All of those tests show your actual upload speed. The whole concept of "upload speed" or "download speed" are incompletely defined questions. "Upload... to where?" The number that your ISP gives you is likely what they provision for your connection between you and your ISP The number that a speed test gives you is the measured bandwidth between you and the server on the other end. This is expected to be different for different routes across the internet. If you want to test just the pipe between you and your ISP, many ISPs provide their own speed test servers for this purpose. examples: https://speedtest.xfinity.com https://speedtest.xfinity.com https://www.verizon.com/speedtest/ https://www.verizon.com/speedtest/
- jlgaddis 6y ago
  > Is there a good way to test what my actual upload speed is? Yes, use iperf or netperf instead.
- firecall 6y ago
  How do you make https://speed.cloudflare.com/ https://speed.cloudflare.com/ do the upload test? It only shows a download test for me...
lumost 6y ago
Something I find fascinating, over the last 5 years the main bottleneck on my internet connection has gone from the provider to my wifi, despite ~3 standard revisions in that time frame. It makes the notion of a wireless only provider somewhat appealing if they can manage similar speeds to wifi (within range of the 5G standard ).
- feifan 6y ago
  Same! Good thing we have ethernet :P
- nicolaslem 6y ago
  This! You have to admire the engineering that turned a coax cable that could barely handle a few kbps in the early 2000s into something as fast as my LAN today.
  - 2bitencryption 6y ago
    Speaking of this, my mind is in a constant battle between "ISPs like Comcast do nothing to improve the infrastructure they monopolize" and "ISPs like Comcast are doing amazing things like converting an old cable line into a 200mbps downlink and handling 'quarantine-level' network usage with ease". Somehow I think both are true, I'm just not sure how it's possible...
    - proverbialbunny 6y ago
      It used to be my coax node was shared by over 200 people, and that was 1 TV channel equivalent of data. Then DOCSIS 2.0 came out and those 200 people were split between roughly 7 TV channels worth of data. This is how you'd get the standard 6-26 mbps home internet. Then Google Fiber came out and ISPs started running fiber to the streets of most houses, but not running fiber directly to each house. This was in defense of Google Fiber, so they could switch people to fiber gigabit easily with little transition. Now there is DOCSIS 3.0 which does channel bonding, so a single person can have up to the equivalent of 32 TV channels of data, getting up to 1.2 gbps if unshared. Today, the average home shares their bandwidth with between 0 and 3 other houses. The fiber is right outside. If you order gigabit cable internet they will run the fiber to your front yard but not let you connect to it directly. On comcast the lowest speed you can order where you get fiber internet is 2gbps, and because DOCSIS 3.1 now allows 10+ gbps cable internet, Comcast fiber may become a thing of the past. In a way, DOCSIS 3 has been a set back for consumers. Sure you can get multi 100mbps even gbps internet, but it allows cable companies to not have to run fiber that last 30 feet. With fiber your ping time is lower, so your internet feels quite a bit faster. Fast internet today isn't mbps, it's ping time.
theandrewbailey 6y ago
Neat, but there doesn't seem to be a way to change the server you're connecting to. I wondered why map markers were always airports: > Data center locations are tracked as airport codes and may not be 100% accurate.
- falcolas 6y ago
  Airport codes are virtually universal, even across country lines. They're also tied into many other bits of information, such as weather.
- jFriedensreich 6y ago
  the faq on the cloudflare website answers that: they dont publish datacenter locations for security reasons so mostly show the nearest airports on maps
TheSkyHasEyes 6y ago
Nice. Didn't see anything about a terminal client. Still looking for terminal clients beside speedtest-cli. Thanks.
- bswinnerton 6y ago
  iperf3 to a VM is probably your best bet.
- Seirdy 6y ago
  net7-client[0] is the reference implementation for doing speed tests with Measurement Lab, which is also behind the speed test widget in Google search results for the "speed test" query. SpeedTest[1] is an alternative to speedtest-cli for the Ookla speed test, written in C++. [0]: https://github.com/m-lab/ndt7-client-go https://github.com/m-lab/ndt7-client-go [1]: https://github.com/taganaka/SpeedTest https://github.com/taganaka/SpeedTest
js2 6y ago
Cloudflare: 455 Mbps down / 73.1 Mbps up / Latency 13.0 ms / Jitter 2.26 ms / Server: Ashburn via IPv6. Netflix (fast.com): 790 Mbps down / 950 Mbps up / Latency 8 ms unloaded, 12 ms loaded / Server: Ashburn via IPv6. Ookla (speedtest.net): 928 Mbps down / 938 Mbps up / Ping 1 ms / Server: Raleigh via IPv4. DSL Reports (http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest): 611 Mbps down / 929 Mbps up / ping 16-41ms / Servers: Houston, Dallas, Newcastle DE, Nashville TN, Dallas. Location: Raleigh. Provider: AT&T fiber. Test run using Safari, macOS 10.15.4, Thunderbolt Ethernet. Edit: the small file sizes used for some of the tests seem to drag down the overall speed measurement quite a bit. It's biased against upload measurements too since there's download files sizes of 25MB and 100MB whereas upload tests only up to 10MB file size. But even there, something seems off. The upload measurements are much smaller for the same file sizes (e.g. 170 Mbps avg vs 7 Mbs average for a 10 kB file). I question this methodology. I care most about my 1Gps when I'm downloading the latest version of Xcode or some other huge file. I guess the smaller sizes are to better emulate downloading web pages, but in that case, the latency is probably what matters more. Even with 1Gps, when I'm out in CA, sites typically feel faster. Edit 2: speedtest.googlefiber.net: 800-900 Mbps down / 800-900 Mbps up (multiple tests to servers in Charlotte, Raleigh, Atlanta, seems to bounce around each time I reload the page). Speedtest (Ookla) with server manually set to Windstream in Ashburn, VA: 886 Mbps down, 900 Mbps up. Confirmed that my router is measuring the same amount, so Ookla isn't just making up these numbers.
- kirktrue 6y ago
  Now you're just showing off ;)
  - popped 6y ago
    No I think this is important. Are they that wildly different from each other that they aren't that useful? Is one better than the rest?
- cryptoquick 6y ago
  I also have synchronous gigabit fiber, and I was surprised to get way different results from the others. They're similar to yours. Not sure if this is on CloudFlare's end, or if there's something on my end or my ISP's end.
karambir 6y ago
I think it will be similar to netflix fast.com but it selected Mumbai servers when I am in Delhi(CF has servers in Delhi). Maybe this is intentional? Kept getting the test paused automatically on Firefox Dev Edition. Looking at the console: Error fetching https://speed.cloudflare.com/__down?measId=2826350041244361&bytes=1000: TypeError: can't access property "transferSize", i is undefined
- heavymark 6y ago
  On ethernet always get close to 1Gbps on Fast.com by CF shows consistently around 300-400. Wonder if CF is more accurate or Fast.com? I'm imagining CF but such a difference.
  - jedieaston 6y ago
    Fast.com specifically measures your speed to a Netflix mirror, vs CloudFlare measuring your speed to a CloudFlare data center. Netflix probably has a box in your ISPs data center/head end that is closer to you (unless you live in a town with a CloudFlare data center, in which case the difference shouldn't be this drastic). CF's score is probably more relevant since there's a lot more sites that are hosted there than netflix (which is just netflix).
- mike_d 6y ago
  Having built a few CDNs, I can tell you geographic proximity isn't a good metric for which POP is "best". You might be located in Delhi, but maybe your ISP backhauls all your traffic to their head office in Mumbai for example. It wouldn't make sense to then ship your traffic back to Delhi just to serve it from the geographically closest location when Mumbai is your "network closest." The Delhi POP might also be overloaded, or down for router maintenance, or they can serve your traffic cheaper from Mumbai.
mjmasn 6y ago
Interesting... I got a result of 44Mb/s down, which is 8 more than I pay for and 13 more than any other speed test shows (i.e. speedtest.net, fast.com, BT Wholesale speed check).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
How precisely did they pinpoint you on the map? 100m/300ft here in a chromium derivative i reserve for stuff like that. /me feels im/depressed. edit: Latency varies but goes down to 6 to 5.5ms, similar for jitter, but even lower to just above 4ms. Line almost maxed out. Just missing 5up/2down. On really ancient HW :-)
- capableweb 6y ago
  Your IP address (which is "owned" by your ISP) has a location assigned to it, usually the closest "router" run by your ISP. Depends on how your internet infrastructure looks where you live, but where I live, the map is off by ~3.56 km (~2.21 mi).
- banana_giraffe 6y ago
  It's about 8km off for me, in a different city. They appear to be putting me exactly where MaxMind's GeoIP database thinks I am.
scarface74 6y ago
CloudFlare - 595/29.8 Netflix - 700/280 DslReports - 400/638 Speedtest (Okla) - 602/621 All of these are on a Dell using a USB3 Ethernet adapter. The only thing that I currently have running gigabit not through an adapter is my AppleTV4 running the speedtest app. AppleTV 4/SpeedTest (Okla) - 925/751
anonymousab 6y ago
Measuring and showing jitter by default is nice. On the online gaming end of things it can be much more important than other metrics, depending on the genre. But there is an unfortunate amount of misconceptions floating around out there, and people tend to default to "higher speed = better" speed test results, when bandwidth doesn't really matter beyond a certain baseline.
maallooc 6y ago
897 / 343 Mbps, not too shabby but expected better. In my region it seems only Azure manages to pump full gigabit up and down.
capableweb 6y ago
Something seems severely wrong, either on Cloudflare's side, or on the way to the cloudflare edge that the test is measuring against. It's a shame as the UI gives you lots of information on just one page, especially like the jitter measurement which most speedtests don't seem to do anymore. speed.cloudflare.com: 57.7Mbps (Server location: Madrid) Fast.com: 320Mbps Speedtest.net: 528.39Mpbs
gok 6y ago
It would be interesting to actually see how Anycast is finding the Cloudflare edge location, and how the traffic is getting routed.
- jlgaddis 6y ago
  So run a traceroute?
hvenev 6y ago
It doesn't work for me. When it starts, I get a bunch of errors: Error fetching https://speed.cloudflare.com/__down?measId=4466372954803167&bytes=1000 https://speed.cloudflare.com/__down?measId=4466372954803167&...: TypeError: i is undefined Then it pauses itself. When I resume it, it runs for a few seconds (printing more errors) and pauses again. I am using Firefox 76.0.1 on Fedora 32 x86_64. None of the adblocker addons I'm using are blocking anything.
- _salmon 6y ago
  Getting the same error with Firefox 75 on MacOS 10.14.5
- Krasnol 6y ago
  Works here with 76.0.2 on Windows 10
- ChymeraXYZ 6y ago
  Seems to be the case if you have a bit more locked down browser and don't allow all willy-nilly fingerprinting to happen.
  - hvenev 6y ago
    Well, my browser is not that locked down. I have enabled cookies and JavaScript, and I think I am only using the level 1 blocklist (as explained here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/content-blocking https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/content-blocking). Edit: For the reference, I believe that the default should be at least as locked down as my thing (all third-party cookies blocked and so on).
- zelly 6y ago
  Yup doesn't work on Firefox. Also using Fedora.
- jgrahamc 6y ago
  We're getting that fixed. Sorry about the trouble.
- 6y ago
hugoromano 6y ago
Cloudflare: ▼ 567 Mbps ▲ 50 Mbps Payload 100Mb Latency 15ms Netflix: ▼ 890 Mbps ▲ 160 Mbps Payload 720Mb Latency 13ms Netflix Open Connect is inside my ISP network
- danieldk 6y ago
  Netflix Open Connect is inside my ISP network And still a latency of 13ms? Here, Cloudflare, Netflix, Google, and Ookla Speedtest all have latencies of 4-6ms.
  - betaby 6y ago
    Probably coax, only explanation of 13ms
  - hugoromano 6y ago
    I'm 900Km away from the datacentre via a submarine fibre but the way routing is done it feels it is metadata surveillance.
skilled 6y ago
The data on this page means nothing to me. And, I've grown accustomed to using Fast by Netflix - straight to the point.
cryptoquick 6y ago
Oh, cool! CloudFlare, my favorite company, just made a speedtest! - It starts as soon as you visit, other speed tests don't, which violates a user's consent. - It collects and saves your data, also without asking. - It gives wildly different results than other speedtests, with no explanation as to why. Of course CloudFlare would screw up a speedtest. They screw up at everything else they do, so I'm 100% not surprised.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- owenmarshall 6y ago
  > It starts as soon as you visit, other speed tests don't, which violates a user's consent. 1) fast.com, 2) this feels like a reach, isn't "going to a speed test site" a pretty clear indicator of what the user intends to do? > It gives wildly different results than other speedtests, with no explanation as to why. I'm confused what your platonic ideal of a speed test is. Off the top of my head, I may care about: * "speed to my ISP" * "speed to something I care about that's 'nearby'" (fast.com to a Netflix box peered close to me) * "speed to a CDN" (speed.cloudflare.com) * "speed to a random data center somewhere" (speedof.me and friends) * "speed to a box I own" I'd be amazed if I didn't see significant deviation between all of those measures.
  - rndgermandude 6y ago
    I am on the fence about the consent thing. Yes, it's a speed test, but no, you don't really necessarily know that when it gets linked on some site. Burning through quite a bit of potentially metered data without asking first seems... rude, at the very least.
  - cryptoquick 6y ago
    It's not hard to put a button. And not putting one (and still collecting the resulting data) is against the law in several places around the world. Trust me, if you have a gigabit fiber connection like mine, you would notice that their results are way, way off the mark. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23314368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23314368
vezycash 6y ago
From their FAQ: "Why build another speed test tool? There are many speed test tools out there. Our mission is to help build a better Internet. To do so, we believe in giving users a choice of different services: you shouldn’t be tied to one provider and you should be able to compare results across different tools." This tool would be more useful when it allows people to "compare" their speed with others. Average speed in their country One network with another in the same country Compare a country's average speed with another Rank... Add the benchmarks and put a share to social media button and HOPEFULLY. One other thing - add (Megabytes per second)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
jzoch 6y ago
Its showing my location as Kansas (0, US) despite being in SF. Tried a different browser, disabled add-ons...no dice.
- TheFlyingFish 6y ago
  Are you on IPv6 by any chance? I got the same thing, despite being in SoCal. I saw that the site was showing my IPv6 address, so I checked a couple of location databases and I'm getting results that are way off. A couple say New Jersey, one says "North America" and leaves it at that. I think that might match whatever Cloudflare is using since the dot is just in the middle of the US, i.e. Kansas. Regardless, it's showing me as connecting to the LA server, which is almost undoubtedly the clostest PoP, so I'm not too concerned.
7ewis 6y ago
Love how Cloudflare keep coming out with all these new tools, 1.1.1.1 DNS, then VPN, isbgpsafeyet.com now this. The CEO is awesome too, and often hangs around HN. I seem to be getting pretty accurate results unlike others here, not sure if it's been fixed or my peerings are better: Tests (Download): Cloudflare: 78, 73, 73, 73 Netflix: 74, 78, 71, 69 Google: 70, 70, 70, 65 Speedtest.net: 68, 67, 70, 71 I know this doesn't mean too much alone, but for me seemed to produce on average the highest speed.
- capableweb 6y ago
  Seems to be degrading since I first tried one hour ago, so nothing been fixed. Most likely the edge servers are not as great as they are made out to be, so we're seeing wildly different results depending on the location/edge server you're connected to.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- majjaa 6y ago
  > The CEO is awesome too, and often hangs around HN. Lol, no he isn't awesome at all. CTO who hangs around is here is a way better person.
fermienrico 6y ago
> There are many speed test tools out there. Our mission is to help build a better Internet. To do so, we believe in giving users a choice of different services: you shouldn’t be tied to one provider and you should be able to compare results across different tools. Under "About" section. That's a really weak argument to invent a new tool.
- arghwhat 6y ago
  That's actually a really strong argument to invent a new tool, especially for speed tests. Each provider can never paint a full picture on their own, so having multiple things to test against is useful.
  - fermienrico 6y ago
    You can make that argument literally for everything and anything. Why need a new programming language? Well, because we think that our users deserve more choices. That does not fly well when someone needs to fork out $$$ to fund the activity. Back to the topic, what users really need is a way to run all available tools (there are many speed test tools out there) and provide them a "full picture" in one shot. Sure, the test will take 3 mins to run but it would more useful if you're concerned about usefulness.
    - arghwhat 6y ago
      Indeed, you can make that argument for everything, and it still holds. You want more competition, not less. From a speed-test service, difference is indeed in who you test against: Location is a feature. No different than programming languages providing different features. Without this service, you would not be able to speedtest towards cloudflare infrastructure at all. You'd need this at the very least to try to create the "monster" test-suite you suggest. However, it is entirely impossible to provide "a full picture", simply because there is no such thing. In a given moment, there is a given possible throughput and latency for any given point A to point B, which holds no value for any other point, or any other time.
    - 6y ago
SigmundA 6y ago
I have 100MBps Frontier FIOS: Cloudflare: 244 Mbps Fast: 100Mbps Speedtest.net: 83 Mbps Cloudflare seems to consistently report higher than cap speeds due to 100k and 1mb files not engaging the traffic shaper, while the 10MB files seems to be in line with the other speed tests which they seem to do a continuous download.
- SigmundA 6y ago
  Also would be nice if the line chart had hover info to let you know which test it was running at the time.
morsch 6y ago
Seeing modern internet speeds still puts a grin on my face. It's so fast. I really should not be getting >100 Mbps sustained to a regional server and 50 Mbps across an ocean -- those will always be local area speeds in my mind. Not that you'd know it, browsing the web.
yalogin 6y ago
Why would they start the test without warning like that? I would have probably preferred to opt out of their data collection process.
frouge 6y ago
ethernet: 860 \o/ wifi: 70 :'(
bityard 6y ago
Lots of people here are reporting lower-than-expected speeds with the Cloudflare tool compared to other speed-test sites. I thought it was pretty well known at this point that ISPs optimize traffic for speed-test sites and throttle a lot of regular traffic, especially during heavy-traffic times like the after-dinner Netflix bump. Since this is a new tool, a plausible explanation for lower speeds is that not all of the ISPs' network engineers have had a chance to prioritize Cloudflare's speed test traffic on their routers along with the other speed test tools. Part of me wonders if this is part of a ploy by Cloudflare to avoid throttling by ISPs. If they design it right, the ISP can't tell the difference beween the speed test and regular CDN content, which would be extremely clever.
- sneak 6y ago
  The fast.com speedtest is run by Netflix, for presumably this same reason.
- dmerks 6y ago
  Download speed on current device: with ISP speed test: 230 Mbps with fast.com: 200 Mbps with speed.cloudflare.com: 43 Mbps
- tonyb 6y ago
  Having worked on several ISP networks that practice isn’t nearly as common as many people seam to think. It would be technically difficult to do that at the rate of a large ISP. There could be capacity issues between an ISP and some content providers but that is different than throttling or optimizing traffic.
garaetjjte 6y ago
Would be nice to have manual IPv4/v6 switch.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dzonga 6y ago
you can easily tell, it's a react app. if you've developed react apps. subtle data rendering bugs.
- odensc 6y ago
  Care to point out any of these bugs or...?
nunez 6y ago
Results don't add up for me. Fast.com: 620 Mbps Down, 650 Mbps Up, DFW/ATL Dslreports: 889 Mbps down, 944 Mbps Up, LAX/IAH Ookla: 919 Mbps down, 934 Mbps Up, DFW/Richardson Speed.cloudflare.com: 118 Mbps down, DFW/Arlington (closest) I then tried to run the speed test from cURL by sending a GET to the same URLs this test uses, but it seems that I can't ask for anything larger than a 100MB payload. This is unusual since other speed tests allow you to download/upload up to 1GB in each direction. I'm wondering if this speed test should use larger files for fast connections.
chaz6 6y ago
It is a shame there is not an option to force IPv4 or IPv6. It defaults to IPv6 which is good, except that because my ISP does not offer IPv6 I am forced to use a tunnel, and that tunnel gives a misleading result compared to my ISP.
lewisj489 6y ago
Wait... is the London one IN Heathrow airport?
prirun 6y ago
This gives me NaN's when hovering over the 10K download test.
terrywang 6y ago
Feel embarrassed when looking at the consumer Internet bandwidth other developed countries are having. Meanwhile in Australia (down-under), I've waited for so long to get NBN (can only get HFC at my place which was like over 20 years old? At least at my hometown Shanghai, had something better than that in 2001 (GFW wasn't in shape back then) - I remember it clearly because that's when I started Linux journey by install Mandrake 8.1 ;-). I was quite excited when finally enjoying 100Mbps down / 40Mbps up (I was told here in Oz consumer Internet upload is always capped at 40% of download bandwidth), before the cable was 100Mbps/2Mbps, useless to the way I abuse network (mainly transferring data to North America). Have been experiencing congestion and degraded upload bandwidth (only 4Mbps ~ 8Mbps) since the pandemic, it did not restore until public school students went back to school (last week...), finally the infrastructure issue got fixed by the lift of social restrictions LMAO.

498 points by manigandham 6y ago

harias 6y ago

Warning: The website starts an internet speed test as soon as you click on the link.

rkagerer 6y ago
Good, that's why I went there. The name is fairly descriptive; it does what's advertised without any subterfuge. And there's a Pause button.
- anonymousab 6y ago
  A lot of the commonly used speed tests have a start or Go button. This isn't bad behaviour, people just may not expect it based on what they are used to.
  - SamWhited 6y ago
    It's bad behavior if you're paying a lot for bandwidth…
- capableweb 6y ago
  I thought it was gonna be a public dashboard of transfer bandwidth globally in the cloudflare network, so domain could have been more descriptive. How about "speedtest.cloudflare.com"?
- gpm 6y ago
  Not good. I didn't click on the link because I was worried it might, but I almost did. If I had I would have probably brought at least one video conference to a halt.
surround 6y ago
And (as you might expect) Cloudflare collects and saves data from the test.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

MadVikingGod 6y ago

I'm seeing that my upload speed (90M) is way under both what is advertised, and what other speed tests show. Is there a good way to test what my actual upload speed is?

drewg123 6y ago
I see the same 90Mb/s as you, so I suspect they are capping at 90Mb/s. For another test, try fast.com and click "more info" after the download stops. I have fios 1Gb service. From clouldflare I see ~500Mb/s down and 90Mb/s up, and fast.com shows 600Mb/s down and 900Mb/s up.
- dylanpyle 6y ago
  anecdotally - my results here show approximately the speed i'm paying for, which is higher than 90
kube-system 6y ago
All of those tests show your actual upload speed. The whole concept of "upload speed" or "download speed" are incompletely defined questions. "Upload... to where?" The number that your ISP gives you is likely what they provision for your connection between you and your ISP The number that a speed test gives you is the measured bandwidth between you and the server on the other end. This is expected to be different for different routes across the internet. If you want to test just the pipe between you and your ISP, many ISPs provide their own speed test servers for this purpose. examples: https://speedtest.xfinity.com https://speedtest.xfinity.com https://www.verizon.com/speedtest/ https://www.verizon.com/speedtest/
jlgaddis 6y ago
> Is there a good way to test what my actual upload speed is? Yes, use iperf or netperf instead.
firecall 6y ago
How do you make https://speed.cloudflare.com/ https://speed.cloudflare.com/ do the upload test? It only shows a download test for me...

lumost 6y ago

Something I find fascinating, over the last 5 years the main bottleneck on my internet connection has gone from the provider to my wifi, despite ~3 standard revisions in that time frame. It makes the notion of a wireless only provider somewhat appealing if they can manage similar speeds to wifi (within range of the 5G standard ).

feifan 6y ago
Same! Good thing we have ethernet :P
nicolaslem 6y ago
This! You have to admire the engineering that turned a coax cable that could barely handle a few kbps in the early 2000s into something as fast as my LAN today.
- 2bitencryption 6y ago
  Speaking of this, my mind is in a constant battle between "ISPs like Comcast do nothing to improve the infrastructure they monopolize" and "ISPs like Comcast are doing amazing things like converting an old cable line into a 200mbps downlink and handling 'quarantine-level' network usage with ease". Somehow I think both are true, I'm just not sure how it's possible...
  - proverbialbunny 6y ago
    It used to be my coax node was shared by over 200 people, and that was 1 TV channel equivalent of data. Then DOCSIS 2.0 came out and those 200 people were split between roughly 7 TV channels worth of data. This is how you'd get the standard 6-26 mbps home internet. Then Google Fiber came out and ISPs started running fiber to the streets of most houses, but not running fiber directly to each house. This was in defense of Google Fiber, so they could switch people to fiber gigabit easily with little transition. Now there is DOCSIS 3.0 which does channel bonding, so a single person can have up to the equivalent of 32 TV channels of data, getting up to 1.2 gbps if unshared. Today, the average home shares their bandwidth with between 0 and 3 other houses. The fiber is right outside. If you order gigabit cable internet they will run the fiber to your front yard but not let you connect to it directly. On comcast the lowest speed you can order where you get fiber internet is 2gbps, and because DOCSIS 3.1 now allows 10+ gbps cable internet, Comcast fiber may become a thing of the past. In a way, DOCSIS 3 has been a set back for consumers. Sure you can get multi 100mbps even gbps internet, but it allows cable companies to not have to run fiber that last 30 feet. With fiber your ping time is lower, so your internet feels quite a bit faster. Fast internet today isn't mbps, it's ping time.

theandrewbailey 6y ago

Neat, but there doesn't seem to be a way to change the server you're connecting to. I wondered why map markers were always airports: > Data center locations are tracked as airport codes and may not be 100% accurate.

falcolas 6y ago
Airport codes are virtually universal, even across country lines. They're also tied into many other bits of information, such as weather.
jFriedensreich 6y ago
the faq on the cloudflare website answers that: they dont publish datacenter locations for security reasons so mostly show the nearest airports on maps

TheSkyHasEyes 6y ago

Nice. Didn't see anything about a terminal client. Still looking for terminal clients beside speedtest-cli. Thanks.

bswinnerton 6y ago
iperf3 to a VM is probably your best bet.
Seirdy 6y ago
net7-client[0] is the reference implementation for doing speed tests with Measurement Lab, which is also behind the speed test widget in Google search results for the "speed test" query. SpeedTest[1] is an alternative to speedtest-cli for the Ookla speed test, written in C++. [0]: https://github.com/m-lab/ndt7-client-go https://github.com/m-lab/ndt7-client-go [1]: https://github.com/taganaka/SpeedTest https://github.com/taganaka/SpeedTest

js2 6y ago

Cloudflare: 455 Mbps down / 73.1 Mbps up / Latency 13.0 ms / Jitter 2.26 ms / Server: Ashburn via IPv6. Netflix (fast.com): 790 Mbps down / 950 Mbps up / Latency 8 ms unloaded, 12 ms loaded / Server: Ashburn via IPv6. Ookla (speedtest.net): 928 Mbps down / 938 Mbps up / Ping 1 ms / Server: Raleigh via IPv4. DSL Reports (http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest): 611 Mbps down / 929 Mbps up / ping 16-41ms / Servers: Houston, Dallas, Newcastle DE, Nashville TN, Dallas. Location: Raleigh. Provider: AT&T fiber. Test run using Safari, macOS 10.15.4, Thunderbolt Ethernet. Edit: the small file sizes used for some of the tests seem to drag down the overall speed measurement quite a bit. It's biased against upload measurements too since there's download files sizes of 25MB and 100MB whereas upload tests only up to 10MB file size. But even there, something seems off. The upload measurements are much smaller for the same file sizes (e.g. 170 Mbps avg vs 7 Mbs average for a 10 kB file). I question this methodology. I care most about my 1Gps when I'm downloading the latest version of Xcode or some other huge file. I guess the smaller sizes are to better emulate downloading web pages, but in that case, the latency is probably what matters more. Even with 1Gps, when I'm out in CA, sites typically feel faster. Edit 2: speedtest.googlefiber.net: 800-900 Mbps down / 800-900 Mbps up (multiple tests to servers in Charlotte, Raleigh, Atlanta, seems to bounce around each time I reload the page). Speedtest (Ookla) with server manually set to Windstream in Ashburn, VA: 886 Mbps down, 900 Mbps up. Confirmed that my router is measuring the same amount, so Ookla isn't just making up these numbers.

kirktrue 6y ago
Now you're just showing off ;)
- popped 6y ago
  No I think this is important. Are they that wildly different from each other that they aren't that useful? Is one better than the rest?
cryptoquick 6y ago
I also have synchronous gigabit fiber, and I was surprised to get way different results from the others. They're similar to yours. Not sure if this is on CloudFlare's end, or if there's something on my end or my ISP's end.

karambir 6y ago

I think it will be similar to netflix fast.com but it selected Mumbai servers when I am in Delhi(CF has servers in Delhi). Maybe this is intentional? Kept getting the test paused automatically on Firefox Dev Edition. Looking at the console: Error fetching https://speed.cloudflare.com/__down?measId=2826350041244361&bytes=1000: TypeError: can't access property "transferSize", i is undefined

heavymark 6y ago
On ethernet always get close to 1Gbps on Fast.com by CF shows consistently around 300-400. Wonder if CF is more accurate or Fast.com? I'm imagining CF but such a difference.
- jedieaston 6y ago
  Fast.com specifically measures your speed to a Netflix mirror, vs CloudFlare measuring your speed to a CloudFlare data center. Netflix probably has a box in your ISPs data center/head end that is closer to you (unless you live in a town with a CloudFlare data center, in which case the difference shouldn't be this drastic). CF's score is probably more relevant since there's a lot more sites that are hosted there than netflix (which is just netflix).
mike_d 6y ago
Having built a few CDNs, I can tell you geographic proximity isn't a good metric for which POP is "best". You might be located in Delhi, but maybe your ISP backhauls all your traffic to their head office in Mumbai for example. It wouldn't make sense to then ship your traffic back to Delhi just to serve it from the geographically closest location when Mumbai is your "network closest." The Delhi POP might also be overloaded, or down for router maintenance, or they can serve your traffic cheaper from Mumbai.

mjmasn 6y ago

Interesting... I got a result of 44Mb/s down, which is 8 more than I pay for and 13 more than any other speed test shows (i.e. speedtest.net, fast.com, BT Wholesale speed check).

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LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago

How precisely did they pinpoint you on the map? 100m/300ft here in a chromium derivative i reserve for stuff like that. /me feels im/depressed. edit: Latency varies but goes down to 6 to 5.5ms, similar for jitter, but even lower to just above 4ms. Line almost maxed out. Just missing 5up/2down. On really ancient HW :-)

capableweb 6y ago
Your IP address (which is "owned" by your ISP) has a location assigned to it, usually the closest "router" run by your ISP. Depends on how your internet infrastructure looks where you live, but where I live, the map is off by ~3.56 km (~2.21 mi).
banana_giraffe 6y ago
It's about 8km off for me, in a different city. They appear to be putting me exactly where MaxMind's GeoIP database thinks I am.

scarface74 6y ago

CloudFlare - 595/29.8 Netflix - 700/280 DslReports - 400/638 Speedtest (Okla) - 602/621 All of these are on a Dell using a USB3 Ethernet adapter. The only thing that I currently have running gigabit not through an adapter is my AppleTV4 running the speedtest app. AppleTV 4/SpeedTest (Okla) - 925/751

anonymousab 6y ago

Measuring and showing jitter by default is nice. On the online gaming end of things it can be much more important than other metrics, depending on the genre. But there is an unfortunate amount of misconceptions floating around out there, and people tend to default to "higher speed = better" speed test results, when bandwidth doesn't really matter beyond a certain baseline.

maallooc 6y ago

897 / 343 Mbps, not too shabby but expected better. In my region it seems only Azure manages to pump full gigabit up and down.

capableweb 6y ago

Something seems severely wrong, either on Cloudflare's side, or on the way to the cloudflare edge that the test is measuring against. It's a shame as the UI gives you lots of information on just one page, especially like the jitter measurement which most speedtests don't seem to do anymore. speed.cloudflare.com: 57.7Mbps (Server location: Madrid) Fast.com: 320Mbps Speedtest.net: 528.39Mpbs

gok 6y ago

It would be interesting to actually see how Anycast is finding the Cloudflare edge location, and how the traffic is getting routed.

jlgaddis 6y ago
So run a traceroute?

hvenev 6y ago

It doesn't work for me. When it starts, I get a bunch of errors: Error fetching https://speed.cloudflare.com/__down?measId=4466372954803167&bytes=1000 https://speed.cloudflare.com/__down?measId=4466372954803167&...: TypeError: i is undefined Then it pauses itself. When I resume it, it runs for a few seconds (printing more errors) and pauses again. I am using Firefox 76.0.1 on Fedora 32 x86_64. None of the adblocker addons I'm using are blocking anything.

_salmon 6y ago
Getting the same error with Firefox 75 on MacOS 10.14.5
Krasnol 6y ago
Works here with 76.0.2 on Windows 10
ChymeraXYZ 6y ago
Seems to be the case if you have a bit more locked down browser and don't allow all willy-nilly fingerprinting to happen.
- hvenev 6y ago
  Well, my browser is not that locked down. I have enabled cookies and JavaScript, and I think I am only using the level 1 blocklist (as explained here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/content-blocking https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/content-blocking). Edit: For the reference, I believe that the default should be at least as locked down as my thing (all third-party cookies blocked and so on).
zelly 6y ago
Yup doesn't work on Firefox. Also using Fedora.
jgrahamc 6y ago
We're getting that fixed. Sorry about the trouble.
6y ago

hugoromano 6y ago

Cloudflare: ▼ 567 Mbps ▲ 50 Mbps Payload 100Mb Latency 15ms Netflix: ▼ 890 Mbps ▲ 160 Mbps Payload 720Mb Latency 13ms Netflix Open Connect is inside my ISP network

danieldk 6y ago
Netflix Open Connect is inside my ISP network And still a latency of 13ms? Here, Cloudflare, Netflix, Google, and Ookla Speedtest all have latencies of 4-6ms.
- betaby 6y ago
  Probably coax, only explanation of 13ms
- hugoromano 6y ago
  I'm 900Km away from the datacentre via a submarine fibre but the way routing is done it feels it is metadata surveillance.

skilled 6y ago

The data on this page means nothing to me. And, I've grown accustomed to using Fast by Netflix - straight to the point.

cryptoquick 6y ago

Oh, cool! CloudFlare, my favorite company, just made a speedtest! - It starts as soon as you visit, other speed tests don't, which violates a user's consent. - It collects and saves your data, also without asking. - It gives wildly different results than other speedtests, with no explanation as to why. Of course CloudFlare would screw up a speedtest. They screw up at everything else they do, so I'm 100% not surprised.

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owenmarshall 6y ago
> It starts as soon as you visit, other speed tests don't, which violates a user's consent. 1) fast.com, 2) this feels like a reach, isn't "going to a speed test site" a pretty clear indicator of what the user intends to do? > It gives wildly different results than other speedtests, with no explanation as to why. I'm confused what your platonic ideal of a speed test is. Off the top of my head, I may care about: * "speed to my ISP" * "speed to something I care about that's 'nearby'" (fast.com to a Netflix box peered close to me) * "speed to a CDN" (speed.cloudflare.com) * "speed to a random data center somewhere" (speedof.me and friends) * "speed to a box I own" I'd be amazed if I didn't see significant deviation between all of those measures.
- rndgermandude 6y ago
  I am on the fence about the consent thing. Yes, it's a speed test, but no, you don't really necessarily know that when it gets linked on some site. Burning through quite a bit of potentially metered data without asking first seems... rude, at the very least.
- cryptoquick 6y ago
  It's not hard to put a button. And not putting one (and still collecting the resulting data) is against the law in several places around the world. Trust me, if you have a gigabit fiber connection like mine, you would notice that their results are way, way off the mark. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23314368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23314368

vezycash 6y ago

From their FAQ: "Why build another speed test tool? There are many speed test tools out there. Our mission is to help build a better Internet. To do so, we believe in giving users a choice of different services: you shouldn’t be tied to one provider and you should be able to compare results across different tools." This tool would be more useful when it allows people to "compare" their speed with others. Average speed in their country One network with another in the same country Compare a country's average speed with another Rank... Add the benchmarks and put a share to social media button and HOPEFULLY. One other thing - add (Megabytes per second)

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jzoch 6y ago

Its showing my location as Kansas (0, US) despite being in SF. Tried a different browser, disabled add-ons...no dice.

TheFlyingFish 6y ago
Are you on IPv6 by any chance? I got the same thing, despite being in SoCal. I saw that the site was showing my IPv6 address, so I checked a couple of location databases and I'm getting results that are way off. A couple say New Jersey, one says "North America" and leaves it at that. I think that might match whatever Cloudflare is using since the dot is just in the middle of the US, i.e. Kansas. Regardless, it's showing me as connecting to the LA server, which is almost undoubtedly the clostest PoP, so I'm not too concerned.

7ewis 6y ago

Love how Cloudflare keep coming out with all these new tools, 1.1.1.1 DNS, then VPN, isbgpsafeyet.com now this. The CEO is awesome too, and often hangs around HN. I seem to be getting pretty accurate results unlike others here, not sure if it's been fixed or my peerings are better: Tests (Download): Cloudflare: 78, 73, 73, 73 Netflix: 74, 78, 71, 69 Google: 70, 70, 70, 65 Speedtest.net: 68, 67, 70, 71 I know this doesn't mean too much alone, but for me seemed to produce on average the highest speed.

capableweb 6y ago
Seems to be degrading since I first tried one hour ago, so nothing been fixed. Most likely the edge servers are not as great as they are made out to be, so we're seeing wildly different results depending on the location/edge server you're connected to.
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majjaa 6y ago
> The CEO is awesome too, and often hangs around HN. Lol, no he isn't awesome at all. CTO who hangs around is here is a way better person.

fermienrico 6y ago

> There are many speed test tools out there. Our mission is to help build a better Internet. To do so, we believe in giving users a choice of different services: you shouldn’t be tied to one provider and you should be able to compare results across different tools. Under "About" section. That's a really weak argument to invent a new tool.

arghwhat 6y ago
That's actually a really strong argument to invent a new tool, especially for speed tests. Each provider can never paint a full picture on their own, so having multiple things to test against is useful.
- fermienrico 6y ago
  You can make that argument literally for everything and anything. Why need a new programming language? Well, because we think that our users deserve more choices. That does not fly well when someone needs to fork out $$$ to fund the activity. Back to the topic, what users really need is a way to run all available tools (there are many speed test tools out there) and provide them a "full picture" in one shot. Sure, the test will take 3 mins to run but it would more useful if you're concerned about usefulness.
  - arghwhat 6y ago
    Indeed, you can make that argument for everything, and it still holds. You want more competition, not less. From a speed-test service, difference is indeed in who you test against: Location is a feature. No different than programming languages providing different features. Without this service, you would not be able to speedtest towards cloudflare infrastructure at all. You'd need this at the very least to try to create the "monster" test-suite you suggest. However, it is entirely impossible to provide "a full picture", simply because there is no such thing. In a given moment, there is a given possible throughput and latency for any given point A to point B, which holds no value for any other point, or any other time.
  - 6y ago

SigmundA 6y ago

I have 100MBps Frontier FIOS: Cloudflare: 244 Mbps Fast: 100Mbps Speedtest.net: 83 Mbps Cloudflare seems to consistently report higher than cap speeds due to 100k and 1mb files not engaging the traffic shaper, while the 10MB files seems to be in line with the other speed tests which they seem to do a continuous download.

SigmundA 6y ago
Also would be nice if the line chart had hover info to let you know which test it was running at the time.

morsch 6y ago

Seeing modern internet speeds still puts a grin on my face. It's so fast. I really should not be getting >100 Mbps sustained to a regional server and 50 Mbps across an ocean -- those will always be local area speeds in my mind. Not that you'd know it, browsing the web.

yalogin 6y ago

Why would they start the test without warning like that? I would have probably preferred to opt out of their data collection process.

frouge 6y ago

ethernet: 860 \o/ wifi: 70 :'(

bityard 6y ago

Lots of people here are reporting lower-than-expected speeds with the Cloudflare tool compared to other speed-test sites. I thought it was pretty well known at this point that ISPs optimize traffic for speed-test sites and throttle a lot of regular traffic, especially during heavy-traffic times like the after-dinner Netflix bump. Since this is a new tool, a plausible explanation for lower speeds is that not all of the ISPs' network engineers have had a chance to prioritize Cloudflare's speed test traffic on their routers along with the other speed test tools. Part of me wonders if this is part of a ploy by Cloudflare to avoid throttling by ISPs. If they design it right, the ISP can't tell the difference beween the speed test and regular CDN content, which would be extremely clever.

sneak 6y ago
The fast.com speedtest is run by Netflix, for presumably this same reason.
dmerks 6y ago
Download speed on current device: with ISP speed test: 230 Mbps with fast.com: 200 Mbps with speed.cloudflare.com: 43 Mbps
tonyb 6y ago
Having worked on several ISP networks that practice isn’t nearly as common as many people seam to think. It would be technically difficult to do that at the rate of a large ISP. There could be capacity issues between an ISP and some content providers but that is different than throttling or optimizing traffic.

garaetjjte 6y ago

Would be nice to have manual IPv4/v6 switch.

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dzonga 6y ago

you can easily tell, it's a react app. if you've developed react apps. subtle data rendering bugs.

odensc 6y ago
Care to point out any of these bugs or...?

nunez 6y ago

Results don't add up for me. Fast.com: 620 Mbps Down, 650 Mbps Up, DFW/ATL Dslreports: 889 Mbps down, 944 Mbps Up, LAX/IAH Ookla: 919 Mbps down, 934 Mbps Up, DFW/Richardson Speed.cloudflare.com: 118 Mbps down, DFW/Arlington (closest) I then tried to run the speed test from cURL by sending a GET to the same URLs this test uses, but it seems that I can't ask for anything larger than a 100MB payload. This is unusual since other speed tests allow you to download/upload up to 1GB in each direction. I'm wondering if this speed test should use larger files for fast connections.

chaz6 6y ago

It is a shame there is not an option to force IPv4 or IPv6. It defaults to IPv6 which is good, except that because my ISP does not offer IPv6 I am forced to use a tunnel, and that tunnel gives a misleading result compared to my ISP.

lewisj489 6y ago

Wait... is the London one IN Heathrow airport?

prirun 6y ago

This gives me NaN's when hovering over the 10K download test.

terrywang 6y ago

Feel embarrassed when looking at the consumer Internet bandwidth other developed countries are having. Meanwhile in Australia (down-under), I've waited for so long to get NBN (can only get HFC at my place which was like over 20 years old? At least at my hometown Shanghai, had something better than that in 2001 (GFW wasn't in shape back then) - I remember it clearly because that's when I started Linux journey by install Mandrake 8.1 ;-). I was quite excited when finally enjoying 100Mbps down / 40Mbps up (I was told here in Oz consumer Internet upload is always capped at 40% of download bandwidth), before the cable was 100Mbps/2Mbps, useless to the way I abuse network (mainly transferring data to North America). Have been experiencing congestion and degraded upload bandwidth (only 4Mbps ~ 8Mbps) since the pandemic, it did not restore until public school students went back to school (last week...), finally the infrastructure issue got fixed by the lift of social restrictions LMAO.