6 ms·

Why do these speed tests start out slow and then get faster over the course of a few seconds? Is it something about the internet that means the speed changes s

Why do these speed tests start out slow and then get faster over the course of a few seconds? Is it something about the internet that means the speed changes so much over the course of the test?

Severian 3y ago
It's a inherit effect of TCP congestion control. TCP slow start and Window Scaling.
dgb23 3y ago
I can't answer your question directly, because I don't know. But the first keyword I would look at would be BGP. Generally speaking, routing decisions are dynamic and constantly changing. Add the unreliability of the network layer, corporate politics and optimization heuristics to that and you get varying results. https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/security/glossary/what-is-bgp/ https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/security/glossary/what-i... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocol
- bdavbdav 3y ago
  BGP / routing is likely to be static during the course of a test (and indeed much longer)
- nerdbert 3y ago
  Definitely nothing to do with BGP.
raphaelj 3y ago
That's how TCP works. TCP initially starts with a small transmission buffer (the congestion window), and gradually increases its size until it starts getting errors (packet drops or reordering).
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]