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Of course they are not complex. They do have a network effect though. If you go to your local ISP and say “hey, my 500mbps plan is only doing 100mbps on Speedte
by eddythompson80 4mo ago
Of course they are not complex. They do have a network effect though. If you go to your local ISP and say “hey, my 500mbps plan is only doing 100mbps on Speedtest.net”, they’ll “fix it” (usually by working with Ookla to put an edge endpoint on their network)
If you tell the “hey frankyspeeddetect.com isn’t doing my 500mbps” they’ll tell you to it’s an issue with that random website. ISPs and services reach out to Ookla to onboard with them because they have a network effect/mindshare of whatever you wanna call it
- fragmede 4mo agohttp://speed.cloudflare.com http://speed.cloudflare.com is a bit harder to argue with though.
- tverbeure 4mo agoThe difference is that until now I had never heard of speed.cloudflare.com before. (I know about fast.com though.)
- cheema33 4mo agoI had not heard of http://speed.cloudflare.com http://speed.cloudflare.com either. I just tried it and I did not get accurate numbers. wifiman.com, from Ubiquiti/Unifi team does provide more accurate numbers. fast.com numbers are pretty accurate as well.
- amelius 4mo agoI'm a huge fan of https://speed.cloudflare.com/ https://speed.cloudflare.com/ and you'll have to come with better evidence. Also fast.com doesn't even give upload speed and latency.
- andylynch 4mo agoSure it does. Just tap ‘More Info’ to show them
- TheScaryOne 4mo agoThat's not the point of fast.com Fast is a one click solution to finding out your download speed from Netflix. Latency doesn't matter, nor does upload.
- fragmede 4mo ago> I did not get accurate numbers. That's why speedtest.net is a great purchase for Accenture. Of course Cloudflare's speed test is accurate: it's a test of how fast your connection is to their network. No more, no less. That their network doesn't have the same PoPs means it'll have different numbers than Ookla's test, your ISPs advertised numbers, Netflix's test, and any other speed test. But for people that don't see the Internet as a pile of different interconnected networks, the conclusion that a particular test is inaccurate is a win for Accenture.
- is_true 4mo agoThey serve so many sites that they are probably the best test there's now.
- eddythompson80 4mo agoAll these numbers are fake. They are all special cased in most ISPs with the cooperation of cloudflare, Netflix, OOkla, Akamai, Google, etc. The centralization of the internet around AWS, Azure, Google, Netflix, Cloudflare, etc has been a godsend to ISPs and the internet infrastructure in general. Maintaining good network conditions to 4 or 5 dozen networks and working with them closely is so so much easier than maintaining full peer-to-peer network conditions. Go ahead and try to test internet speed to your home network over a wireguard VPN and compare it to the performance of the same VPN when connecting to any of the major services. Try to setup a tunnel between your house and your friends house in the same city and test the speed and compare it to fast.com or cloudflare.com or speedtest.net
- thayne 4mo agoWhen I used a major cable ISP, often my connection seemed slow, so I'd go to speedtest.com. The speedtest would be fine... and then I would magically have faster network performance again. It happened enough times that I'm suspicious the ISP had some way to detect if you run a speedtest, and then prioritized traffic to that customer.
- simmonmt 4mo agoThis was one of the reasons given, at the time, for why Netflix created fast.com. It's served by the same infra that does their streaming, and is thus difficult for isps to game. That is, it'd be hard for them to do some hack to make fast.com numbers without also benefiting Netflix streaming performance in the bargain.
- dmurray 4mo agoActually I thought Netflix had already acquired Ookla / speedtest.com, so I was surprised to see this headline. But it looks like this was just the Mandela effect. That said, why didn't Netflix acquire the market leader in this space? Creating their own seems way less useful, since network effects are the whole point.
- fragmede 4mo agoBecause Netflix doesn't care what your connection to speedtest.net is, they care what your connection to your closest Netflix server box is. A while back, Comcast/your last-mile ISP was throttling traffic to Netflix to get Netflix to pay them. So while Netflix's box had plenty of bandwidth to their ISP, your ISP wasn't using it, intentionally. Fast.com was their response to that, so you could blame your ISP and not Netflix for being slow.
- dmurray 4mo agoI meant, acquire the speedtest.net domain and point it to servers inside Netflix' farm.
- 4mo ago