[HN Gopher] Speed Test
___________________________________________________________________
Speed Test
Author : RadixDLT
Score : 546 points
Date : 2023-08-10 09:30 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (speed.cloudflare.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (speed.cloudflare.com)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Anything new here?
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| I love the box plots! I wish more sites showed distribution
| information, including IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes, because I
| suspect many movies and TV shows have at least bimodal
| distributions.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Great, one more speedtest site to pit against all the others. On
| my gigabyte fibre:
|
| Cloudflare: 697 down / 645 up
|
| fast.com: 860 down / 440 up
|
| Google: 760 down / 347 up
|
| Ookla speedtest: 841 down / 827 up
|
| Quite a large variability in upload speeds, which isn't all the
| surprising I guess. Network providers often don't really need to
| prioritise upload traffic...
| waynesonfire wrote:
| cloudflare: 863 down / 57 / up
|
| ookla speedtest: 940 up / 750 down
| trvz wrote:
| > On my gigabyte fibre:
|
| *gigabit
|
| Get it right already.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I misspoke, but you understood what I meant so no harm was
| done.
| Aissen wrote:
| I have a gigabyte fiber connection @ home (Technically 10G
| EPON which has an effective top speed of 8Gb), so there's no
| way of knowing if it was a mistake or not. (you're probably
| downvoted because of the dismissive tone though)
| im_lince wrote:
| [flagged]
| haunter wrote:
| Pretty much spot on for me. 2gig/1gig fiber internet and I got
| 1.95 Gbps/960 Mbps
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| Wow that's fast.
|
| Genuine question: what's it like having internet that fast?
|
| Because I get 40-50Mbps down and ~16 Mbps down on that tool,
| and I have fibre to the property (yay, Australia) and I'm so
| curious to know what's it like to have a connection that's
| actually _good_.
| bombcar wrote:
| I've ridden a 10g connection to the Internet and the main
| difference is that big downloads/uploads are near instant.
| For regular browsing it's not that noticeable _unless_ it's
| also super low latency.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| I have 500 Mpbs, and the only noticeable difference versus a
| connection like yours is that you can download a Ubuntu ISO
| or a 1080p movie 1-2 minute. That's about it.
| badrequest wrote:
| I ran the test from Austin, and it showed the test server as
| located at the Dallas Airport. I wonder how they decided on which
| landmarks to represent each data center.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Cloudflare represents each datacenter by the nearest airport
| code, even though it's not literally at the airport.
|
| https://developers.cloudflare.com/support/troubleshooting/ge...
| bmo-at wrote:
| Is there a cli tool for this aswell or just the website? At home
| I have my server run a speedtest (ookla for now) running every 30
| minutes because I do not trust my ISP to keep their end of the
| deal. I visualize the results with grafana and would love to
| change over to this. As haivri points out, this is a very
| detailed report!
|
| EDIT: Apparently there is a nodejs module available
| https://github.com/cloudflare/speedtest Totally gonna start this
| project asap
| [deleted]
| beyonddream wrote:
| amazing to see this JS library uses minimal direct dependencies
| and even a separate devDependencies that are not needed for
| runtime -
| https://github.com/cloudflare/speedtest/blob/main/package.js...
| darknavi wrote:
| I do this, although I have a little bit more trust in my fiber
| ISP. More just curious.
|
| I also wonder how much bandwidth I am using by running all of
| these tests, but my ISP doesn't have any caps so I guess it
| doesn't matter.
| teddyh wrote:
| Users in Sweden should use <https://www.bredbandskollen.se/>.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| The interesting thing about this to me is its repeated sampling
| and reporting of a statistical profile of the link. Showing
| distributions for latency and speed, not just a single average.
| Really helpful info on less-consistent connections like Starlink.
|
| Example screenshot here: https://postimg.cc/bDTyy8BM
| tomsmeding wrote:
| That website is not zoomable on mobile, which is a pretty grave
| offence for an _image posting site_.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| ugh you're right. I'm on the lookout for an imgur
| replacement, do you have a recommendation?
| Giorgi wrote:
| how to change server? default one is too close, I need to test
| oversea connection
| 6bb32646d83d wrote:
| Upload results are off for me. I have a 1gbps down/up fiber.
|
| With this speed test, the results are 900mbps down, 400-500mbps
| up (ran a few tests to confirm)
|
| I tried running fast.com, speedtest.net, google speed test and
| verizon speed test (I'm on AT&T), they all show ~950mbps down and
| up
| cbdumas wrote:
| Super cool that this shows latency under load! It's a shame ISPs
| seem to only market their throughput numbers, and never mention
| latency. So many people play multiplayer games now, you would
| think there would be at least some consumer demand to measure and
| improve latency over throughput.
| pseudo_meta wrote:
| btw, on macOS, you can just enter `networkQuality` into your
| terminal for a speed test. No third-party website or tool of any
| kind needed, it's a built-in mac CLI.
| IntelMiner wrote:
| Who's it measuring against? An (internet) speed test by its
| nature requires _some_ remote third-party, if you aren 't just
| testing to your own server
| kimburgess wrote:
| Default is Apple's infra, but you can choose via a config
| flag. You can also run your own: https://github.com/network-
| quality/server
| sgt wrote:
| They seem to have edge servers around the world. Even here in
| South Africa, I got idle latency to be 27ms so it must be
| somewhere in the country. This is from running networkQuality
| on a MacBook Pro.
| tantalor wrote:
| In the case of tool built by Apple, running on Apple client
| hardware, against Apple remote server, that would be "1st
| party", not "3rd party".
| gorgoiler wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's a inherit effect of TCP congestion control. TCP slow start
| and Window Scaling.
| dgb23 wrote:
| 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-i...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocol
| bdavbdav wrote:
| BGP / routing is likely to be static during the course of a
| test (and indeed much longer)
| raphaelj wrote:
| 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]
| [deleted]
| edent wrote:
| Tried on several devices - it consistently under-reads.
|
| I'm on 500Mbps broadband. Ookla and fast.com show 350Mbps via
| WiFi. Cloudflare only 274Mbps.
|
| Similar results on Ethernet. Over 400Mbps on a proper speed test.
| Can't hit 300 on this.
|
| I assume their downstream is capped?
| dboreham wrote:
| Odd to see several posts like this, nobody considering that the
| other tests they've run might be "over-reading".
| JimmaDaRustla wrote:
| How would they "over-read" and be so accurate?
| edent wrote:
| I know that when I download a large file, it usually hits the
| advertised speed. So I'm confident that I can saturate my
| broadband with normal use.
|
| Cloudflare doesn't even get close.
| yakubin wrote:
| Ookla traffic is known to be prioritised by ISPs. Maybe ISPs
| just haven't caught up with Cloudflare yet and what you're
| seeing now is more realistic speeds.
| xnorswap wrote:
| There's an alternative explanation is that it's possible your
| ISP hasn't learned to prioritise this speed test traffic unlike
| other speed tests, and that this is more reflective of general
| real-world performance?
| johneth wrote:
| I've read that often ISPs make exceptions for Ookla and
| fast.com speed tests by removing any sort of throttling to
| produce the best possible test results.
|
| I expect it isn't as easy for ISPs to treat Cloudflare like
| this, as it just looks like normal internet traffic.
| maccard wrote:
| Got a source for ISPs doing that for fast.com? Fast.com is
| netflix, so the same argument applies there - if you get
| 300mbps on fast.com you should get it on netflix too
| xnorswap wrote:
| Indeed, that's part of what motivated netflix to make
| fast.com.
| albert_e wrote:
| is it possible for ISP to distinguish Netflix video
| streams from connections to Fast.com ? (and throttle them
| differently)
|
| PS: my latest ISP router doesn't let me change DNS to my
| local pi-hole. haven't explored all options yet - just
| got new one 2 days ago -- but currently my DNS queries
| are going to whatever is the default set by my ISP.
| amalcon wrote:
| It's theoretically possible, but practically difficult.
| They can tell whether you loaded something from fast.com
| or netflix.com prior to the data stream, or they can give
| full speed initially and throttle after a minute or two
| (longer than people's patience for a speed test, but far
| shorter than a movie).
|
| It's difficult because Netflix can respond to any such
| technique by taking steps to make it less obvious, so you
| just end up with one of these cat-and-mouse games.
| xp84 wrote:
| What's the motivation to rent an ISP router? That's a lot
| more control than many people would prefer to give to an
| entity that is likely anywhere from "greedy and dumb," to
| greedy and outright hostile.
|
| Having DOCSIS, I buy a modem, and own my router. I am
| aware that for more exotic technologies like fiber, a
| rented/ISP-owned 'modem' or network terminal of some sort
| may be compulsory, but a router is a bridge too far (no
| pun intended) for me.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| I've never used a pi-hole; but assuming it works as a
| DHCP server and a DNS resolver, then you should only need
| to disable DHCP in your router. I've never seen a router
| than wouldn't let you disable the DHCP server.
| LoganDark wrote:
| This is why Netflix runs fast.com, so that if an ISP wants
| to cheat on speed tests, people are still going to get
| those cheated speeds even when they stream real Netflix
| videos. Really clever.
| notRobot wrote:
| And the other way around, if they throttle Netflix then
| that'll show up in the speed tests.
| wilkystyle wrote:
| This was my understanding, too. Anecdotally, I've always
| seemed to get slower results on fast.com compared to
| Ookla/speedtest.net/my ISP's speedtest website (the latter
| of which all seemed to show similar results, leading me to
| believe that fast.com was exempt from this sort of
| prioritization).
| adithyassekhar wrote:
| I think fast.com hits netflix's cache server. Pretty much all
| isps have one provided to them by netflix.
| op00to wrote:
| I'm able to hit 800 down and 400 up on the Cloudflare app. On
| fast.com i get 980/980, similar with ookla.
|
| I wonder if it could be that various handoffs with cloudflare's
| network are more busy, but we don't really notice because we're
| not doing speed tests on it. :)
| cpcallen wrote:
| Sigh. Yet another site that completely fails if cookies are
| disabled: just an otherwise blank page with the message
| "Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the
| browser console for more information)", with
| DOMException: Failed to read the 'localStorage' property from
| 'Window': Access is denied for this document.
|
| in the console.
|
| I can believe that it may not be possible to run the test without
| local storage (though it's not obvious that that should be the
| case), but failing to verify that one's website degrades
| gracefully (and in the face of a totally standard and formerly
| common browser configuration, no less) deserves disparagment.
| JimmaDaRustla wrote:
| Local storage is not cookies. This site stores no cookies.
|
| Looks like their map library uses local storage to persist the
| API key (or something innocuous) as a form of caching.
|
| This is on you for not letting apps cache data.
| xyzelement wrote:
| I recently discovered the networkquality tool on Mac. As far as I
| can tell it's the only tool that measures simultaneous upload and
| download speeds which is more reflective of real world video
| conferencing use cases.
|
| I was using it to see if my new hardcore gaming router gave me
| better range than the old one. On isolated up and down tests, it
| did. But on combined tests, the advantage especially for upload
| disappeared.
| CrLf wrote:
| > which is more reflective of real world video conferencing use
| cases
|
| What's more reflective of real world use cases is a hot
| discussion topic. :)
|
| The "networkQuality" tool on macOS and other implementations(1)
| of the "RPM" algorithm(2) are very good to see how an Internet
| connection behaves under high stress. But the real world is
| seldom high stress (100Mbps+ connections are rarely pushed to
| the limit, honestly).
|
| In your example, video conferencing indeed does simulataneous
| upload and download, but it's also low bandwidth (relatively
| speaking) and doesn't usually come close to saturating a
| connection. It can impacted by other traffic in the same
| connection though.
|
| Which can come from a single user, or multiple users sharing
| the same connection. And neither networkQuality nor
| Cloudflare's speed test measure how a connection behaves with
| multiple users stressing a connection.
|
| In the end, which tool you use depends on what you're trying to
| measure. For me, the Cloudflare speed test is closer to
| measuring what I experience in real world use.
|
| (1) https://github.com/network-quality/goresponsiveness
|
| (2) https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-cpaasch-ippm-
| responsiv...
| cjk wrote:
| Super impressive level of detail (and easy to understand, at
| that). Cloudflare went hard on the statistics here.
| reboot81 wrote:
| Seems like a great alternative to blip.
|
| https://github.com/apenwarr/blip
| auselen wrote:
| No share/record/export/save button?
| bmo-at wrote:
| There is a csv export and sharing to twitter and facebook for
| me, right nect to pause/retest
| awslattery wrote:
| This has been my go-to over Fast.com for years. The breakdown of
| latencies and speeds at different thresholds was very beneficial
| in validating the behavior of our 5G Home Internet through
| Verizon.
| itvision wrote:
| I use fast.com instead.
|
| This one tests a 10MB chunk at last and that's the only reliable
| indication for me.
|
| 100KB and 1MB down/up load tests show unrealistically low values,
| perhaps due to a high latency (ping).
| CrLf wrote:
| > 100KB and 1MB down/up load tests show unrealistically low
| values, perhaps due to a high latency (ping).
|
| That's related to TCP congestion control. TCP starts slow and
| ramps up speed as download progresses.
|
| But you're right that latency also has an impact on smaller
| downloads, and that's why latency is a critical measurement of
| connection quality for everyone, not just gamers.
| Pxtl wrote:
| It's very cool, but I thing the initial download-speed test is
| very misleading. Consistently I get like 2/3 of my max, but then
| when I let it run to completion and it goes through the longer
| download tests it ramps up to my full speed and I get the full
| value.
| dboreham wrote:
| Um. That's how TCP works.
| Vicinity9635 wrote:
| Interesting. I get higher speeds on cloudflare in chrome.
|
| 603Mbps Cloudflare chrome vs. 600 Mbps Cloudflare firefox
|
| But on fast.com (netflix) it's the opposite:
|
| 440 Mbps fast.com Chrome vs. 590 Mbps fast.com firefox.
| optymizer wrote:
| Download: 636Mbps Upload: 139Mbps Latency: 13.3ms
|
| Not bad for corp VPN.
| jedberg wrote:
| I think this is great service, and here is another one that
| Netflix provides:
|
| https://fast.com
|
| That one uses Netflix servers, so you get a valid test as long as
| your ISP isn't throttling Netflix. Of course they created it so
| that people would call their ISP and complain they aren't getting
| the speed they pay for, but it turns out it's a pretty good test
| most of the time.
|
| And most importantly, it isn't prioritized like speedtest.net.
| ghshephard wrote:
| The prioritization is _critical_ for speedtest.net - it 's
| entire purpose is to provide an assessment of your PHY - not
| your Network, and _certainly_ not your Internet speed.
|
| speedtest.net should tell you if the physical installation of
| your cable was done properly - nothing more.
| p1mrx wrote:
| Nice. Every speed test should have a "latency under load" graph,
| because we can't fight bufferbloat if we can't see it.
|
| DSLReports had the first bufferbloat test I'm aware of, but it's
| broken now. Another example is
| https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat
|
| Ideally this problem should be fixed by ISPs and modem
| manufacturers, but individuals can use OpenWrt with luci-app-sqm,
| at least when the connection has a predictable speed limit.
|
| An option to choose between IPv4/IPv6 (or test both) would
| probably be useful.
| sinak wrote:
| Ah the Waveform test is ours! I've been meaning to post it
| properly to HN since we launched it.
|
| It's far from being a perfect bufferbloat/latency under load
| test, and there's lots of room to improve it, but we built it
| when DSL Reports seemed to be running a little unreliably.
|
| We actually use Cloudflare and Fastly on the backend for
| latency/speed testing. We built and host the test for free
| mostly because I wanted it, but I justified the dev time as it
| being very-roundabout marketing for us - so if you ever need a
| signal booster or MIMO antenna for 5G internet, looks us up :).
| [deleted]
| CrLf wrote:
| Cloudflare's speed test doesn't have a graph for latency under
| load, but it shows those numbers while the test is running.
|
| But you can find those graphs in Cloudflare Radar. Half of the
| https://radar.cloudflare.com/quality section is based on speed
| test data.
| p1mrx wrote:
| I see a graphical visualization of latency with multiple
| points and error bars. Maybe "graph" isn't the right
| technical term?
|
| Edit: It's a box and whisker plot:
| https://www.khanacademy.org/math/statistics-
| probability/summ...
| CrLf wrote:
| Ah, sorry. I thought you were asking for something
| different (more summarized). It does indeed plot latency
| during downloads and uploads in the same way as it plots
| unloaded latency (and I'd call those a "graph" too).
| dom96 wrote:
| Wow, +500ms latency under upload load for me with Hyperoptic.
| Incredibly poor.
| https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat?test-id=8205ec7e-...
| pixl97 wrote:
| Is your router just blasting packets out at full speed or
| does it have a limit set a little below the max. This makes a
| huge difference in latency.
| junon wrote:
| There's no way I'm getting over 500Mbps on my Telekom phone data
| in this elevator right now.
|
| EDIT: fast.com is showing 1Gbps. There's no way that's true.
| bombcar wrote:
| Are you on local 5G? I've seen numbers like that. And they
| often put things in the elevator shafts to prevent dropout.
| bob1029 wrote:
| Might be this building:
|
| https://stelladoradus.com/case-study/mobile-signal-
| solution-...
| johnsonjo wrote:
| Do you have 5G by chance? Have never really looked up 5G speeds
| until now, so I personally was suprised by what I found, but
| apparently the speeds can often be anywhere from 1Gbps to
| 10Gbps, so anywhere in that ballpark or possibly lower could be
| true.
|
| > The theoretical maximum speeds of 5G are pretty
| groundbreaking -- but we have a very long way to go before
| you're likely to hit that kind of peak speed in the real world,
| regardless of your connected device. Depending on your 5G
| coverage, maximum download speeds *often* range from 1Gbps to
| 10Gbps, and latency, or the time it takes to send data, could
| go as low as 1 millisecond (ms). [1]
|
| [1]: https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/how-fast-is-5g/
| gargablegar wrote:
| Fast.com uses local Netflix instances for the data so if you
| near to one yea you can get high speeds. Also 5G might be in
| the building with you #tinfoilhat
| DrFlipper wrote:
| I've been trouble shooting a dodgy 5G connection the last month
| or so and have entirely abandoned fast.com now. It seems
| susceptible to wildly inaccurate results when the connection is
| "bursty", the way 5G can be. I've got some very impressive
| screenshots from it though, next time anyone wants a measuring
| contest.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Smart. With a bit of SEO/marketing, this will become the way
| consumers judge their internet quality. If connection quality =
| ping to cloudflare then that puts cloudflare in a very strong
| negotiating position for peering agreements etc.
| ehhthing wrote:
| > then that puts cloudflare in a very strong negotiating
| position for peering agreements etc.
|
| Ideally settlement peering would exist for _everyone_.
| Cloudflare, like every other sane provider prefers IX routes
| over PNI since it 's less expensive for everyone involved.
| There really shouldn't be a discussion about whether peering
| should be settlement free or not.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| There are decent alternatives for this. Fast.com is hosted by
| Netflix, making them an excellent speedtest to check for
| service throttling. Google has a speedtest as well (Google
| "speed test" and it'll show a button).
|
| The more of these tests start appearing, the better.
| Aachen wrote:
| > hosted by Netflix, making them an excellent speedtest to
| check for service throttling
|
| That's exactly what the person above you meant about
| Cloudflare, right? By using the Netflix speedtest as a
| benchmark, you're promoting good connectivity to another
| commercial entity (for good or for bad, I don't mean to
| judge, just stating)
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Netflix and Google (YouTube) are commercial entities that
| ISPs will intentionally throttle. Reduce the bandwidth for
| all Netflix servers to 5mbps and suddenly you're stuck
| watching at 480p or 720p, even if the connection can handle
| multiple 4k streams.
|
| This is abused for "unlimited data" subscriptions that
| aren't unlimited when you actually try to consume more data
| than a standard subscription would allow you to. Of course
| that's completely illegal in countries with net neutrality
| laws, but not every country has those.
|
| I can't think of a reason why a shitty ISP would throttle
| Cloudflare, as Cloudflare mostly hosts small files. As an
| ISP you want customers to think websites are nice and fast,
| because if only Netflix is slow, surely the problem lies
| with Netflix, right?
|
| If speedtest.net says you have gigabit, Cloudflare says the
| same, and fast.com is giving you 5mbps, your ISP is messing
| with your bandwidth. It could be that Netflix has technical
| issues, but you'd read about those. That's why these tests
| are useful, and why we need more like them.
| Aachen wrote:
| > Netflix and Google (YouTube) are commercial entities
| that ISPs will intentionally throttle.
|
| In Nederland? I only heard these stories from the USA,
| and then specifically about monopoly ISPs with Netflix as
| trial target to see if they can get extra money from them
| jeroenhd wrote:
| We're safe from this nonsense here in the Netherlands
| ever since KPN tried to blocked Skype on their network
| and upset legilators, and the EU has had net neutrality
| law for a while now. However, with most of the internet
| being developed over in the USA, the internet as a whole
| gets better with these features.
|
| I haven't caught any real ISP here (only train/public
| WiFi). I don't trust Dutch ISPs to follow the law so I do
| run these checks every now and then.
|
| At least one American mobile carrier overtly advertises
| "5G" with "unlimited data" followed by "DVD quality
| (480p) standard" video quality, but not every carrier in
| every country will be that direct.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| I've found Fast.com gamed sometimes when traveling in
| Asia/Europe, in the sense the ISP prioritizes Netflix traffic
| but normal traffic never gets within 20% of that Fast.com
| download speed or has much higher latency or something...?
|
| With Cloudflare I'm guessing it's a more balanced measure.
| capableweb wrote:
| Huh, that's strange, I usually see the opposite when I'm
| out and about (particularly in Europe/South America).
| Popular services like Netflix are throttled but downloading
| huge blobs from my own servers is much faster.
| Aachen wrote:
| Here in Europe it's all equally fast. I don't remember
| ever having a throttled service, that sounds like a page
| out of the dystopian scenarios produced in the era where
| net neutrality legislation was being proposed/promoted
| ten years ago or something. There were rumors back then
| that bittorrent was being throttled (and corresponding
| protocol obfuscation and port changing) but I never had
| that myself
| jgtrosh wrote:
| Fast.com was created specifically to pinpoint the
| throttling that was actively applied to Netflix in many
| occurrences back then. It seems to be mostly gone,
| especially since streaming video now accounts for >50% of
| web traffic you can't easily throttle it and hope no one
| notices.
| Aachen wrote:
| In the USA specifically, I thought? Or which other
| regions has that happened in? I remember Comcast
| specifically having a monopoly in many areas and being
| able to pressure Netflix into getting money from both
| sides of the fiber (consumers and service providers)
| capableweb wrote:
| > Here in Europe it's all equally fast
|
| Well, Europe has lots of different countries and I've
| definitely been in countries that are considered to be in
| Europe where it's not equally fast, and using a VPN can
| speed up a lot of things.
| Aachen wrote:
| TIL. I thought net neutrality legislation was EU-wide
| actually. Or maybe it is, but not every European country
| is in the EU, so good point
| [deleted]
| no_time wrote:
| Isn't this exactly what net neutrality laws are supposed
| to ban?
| xp84 wrote:
| sure, but aren't there a lot of places that don't have
| those? I'd say most of the world doesn't, right?
| ehhthing wrote:
| Netflix and Google both have servers colocated within ISPs'
| networks so this is probably why. Also SEA is a routing
| cesspool, many providers don't do settlement free peering
| and actively throttle IX routes, which is probably why your
| Internet was so slow.
| btgeekboy wrote:
| Fast.com frequently tells me speeds that cannot exist. Why
| yes, I am definitely getting 1.2gbps over this gigabit
| Ethernet and 940mbps Internet connection.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Fast.com seemingly tries to compensate for the overhead.
| Bandwidth includes every bit on the wire and that's why
| "940mbps" internet is usually just normal gigabit with a
| bunch of packet headers and intentionally unused transmit
| space consuming the phantom 60mbps.
|
| It's hard to guesstimate the exact bandwidth of the data
| that arrives in your browser because of differences in
| protocol, MTU, header compression and all that nonsense,
| especially over technologies like WiFi. In my experience,
| the WiFi throughput numbers seem spot on.
|
| Their compensation makes for some hilarious statistics,
| but when you're downloading more than 200mbps the
| fast.com speedtest doesn't make much sense anyway. No way
| in hell is Netflix going to allow your single home
| internet connection to somehow pull in a full gigabit of
| streaming video. If you're your own ISP you can make it
| happen, but on the other hand you'll probably also know
| how to get statistics directly from your network
| hardware, in which case the fast.com numbers are useless
| but it still becomes a useful way to spike the load.
|
| Netflix's speedtest is mostly reliable for what it's
| meant to do, which is solve the question of "my internet
| is fast but Netflix keeps buffering".
|
| Edit: another factor to consider is that accurate timing
| has been disabled in most browsers because of side
| channel attacks like SPECTRE. It's possible that those
| are affecting your measurements at very high speeds.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> I 've found Fast.com gamed sometimes ... the ISP
| prioritizes Netflix traffic_
|
| The other side of this is why Netflix created Fast.com in
| the first place: ISPs throttling Netflix traffic (or just
| having poor peering arrangements that affected it) and
| blaming Netflix when customers complained about poor video
| quality (due to Netflix downgrading when experiencing
| congestion) because some speedtest (that likely the ISP
| prioritized, or at least knew it had better peering to)
| gave good numbers.
|
| _> With Cloudflare I 'm guessing it's a more balanced
| measure._
|
| Both serve the same purpose for their respective owners: to
| get good scores on fast.com an ISP can't throttle (or
| allowed to be throttled by avoidable congestion) Netflix
| traffic, to get good scores on speed.cloudflare.com they
| can't throttle (or allowed to be throttled by avoidable
| congestion) traffic to/from Cloudflair's topologically
| local DCs.
|
| From a user's point of view using both, plus other tests,
| gives most meaningful results overall.
| dawnerd wrote:
| And they've figured out how to get around that. T-Mobile
| will show full speed on fast but if you have SD video
| enabled it'll throttle Netflix videos but not fast.
| secondcoming wrote:
| I find fast.com massively overestimates my speeds.
|
| Interestingly, if you hide the tab running their speedtest
| you get even higher speeds.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> I find fast.com massively overestimates my speeds._
|
| I find fast.com more accurate than most, going by the
| throughput I see to/from other resources, particularly for
| upstream rates (which some, including Cloudflair, seem to
| significantly under-measure). Of course this may vary
| depending on line type (FTTC, "up to 67Mbit down n& 17 up",
| generally seeing more like 50/12) and location (due to
| differences in local network conditions and peering between
| you & the speedtest) to I'm not surprised to hear you see
| the results quite different to those I experience.
|
| _> if you hide the tab running their speedtest you get
| even higher speeds_
|
| I suspect this is due to your browser throttling CPU use
| and timer granularity for background or occluded tabs0
| reducing the accuracy of the readings, if the code isn't
| working to mitigate the effect of these throttles on the
| calculations.
|
| --
|
| [0] refs: https://blog.chromium.org/2020/11/tab-throttling-
| and-more-pe..., https://www.reddit.com/r/incremental_games/
| comments/jefviz/f..., and many more
| [deleted]
| vijaykodam wrote:
| Google partners with Measurement Lab (M-Lab) to run this
| test.
| Thoreandan wrote:
| I liked the detailed output of the M-LAB tests,
| unfortunately the amount of data has fallen over time.
| They'd also check for traffic shaping / blocking once upon
| a time. I think the project lasted only as long as the grad
| students who wrote it were there.
| chewmieser wrote:
| Looks great! Didn't realize there was much more that could be
| improved upon vs the alternatives but I think I'll use this again
| next time.
|
| A dedicated domain would be nice. I probably wouldn't recommend
| this to people like fast.com though due to the more complex
| interface, but I love it!
| superhumanuser wrote:
| I'm a fan on https://fast.com
|
| Minimal interface. More details behind a toggle if you need
| them.
| thomasfromcdnjs wrote:
| I love that it shows you the 90th percentile
| cybrox wrote:
| I actually really like the interface. You have the "generic"
| speed test information at the top and a lot more additional
| information at the bottom. It feels a bit overwhelming at
| first, though, granted.
| gumballindie wrote:
| 305 Mbps for me. Cringy how slow internet connetivity is in the
| UK.
| shmde wrote:
| I remember me and my brother getting excited when torrent
| speeds used to touch 200 kbps. Good days.
| jonatron wrote:
| You can download an entire album in minutes, that's crazy
| fast!
| maleldil wrote:
| Are you in London? My 1Gbps link gives 800-900Mbps in these
| speed tests, and I'm fine with that. It's a pitty that some of
| that is unused because I need to use a VPN.
|
| When I lived in a small town, my 500Mbps would give me >400Mbps
| consistently.
| gumballindie wrote:
| MK area. I wish we had gigabit speeds available.
| jonatron wrote:
| Googling says there's CityFibre and Giganet in the MK area.
| Did they skip your house? A fibre company skipped my street
| in London.
| gumballindie wrote:
| Never heard of the two frankly. Thanks for sharing.
| secondcoming wrote:
| That 800-900Mbps doesn't include the bits needed for IP
| packet headers, does it?
| maleldil wrote:
| I'm not sure. All I can say is that speedtest.net and
| fast.com both show 800/ 900 Mbps for download/upload.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Is it cheap?
|
| That's about the same speed for me (in US), and I could get
| gigabit, but I feel that the ~double cost isn't worth it.
| gumballindie wrote:
| It costs around 70 USD per month. Pretty expensive considered
| it's not even gigabit speeds. But as others pointed out I may
| have better options to consider.
| bdavbdav wrote:
| Where are you in the UK that you can get 300 but not gigabit?
| AIUI, you've either got Openreach FTTC (caps out at 80mbps),
| Openreach FTTH (1gbps), Virgin (1gbps) or various alt nets
| (usually 1gbps)
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| Uff. Apparently gives correct readings mostly in Chrome only.
|
| I have a 500/500M connection and on the same computer Chrome
| gives 465/364 and Firefox has 311/303M.
|
| EDIT: this was on Linux/intel.
|
| On Mac M1Pro it Chrome/FF/Safari all get pretty much the same
| numbers.
|
| Both computers have wired ethernet.
| moffkalast wrote:
| I've ran it multiple times in Chrome only and got vastly
| different results just there, from 200 to 600 down on a 500
| connection. Must be heavily dependant on moment-to-moment
| network conditions I guess, to the point where it's nigh
| useless.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Yes, the bandwidth test is so short that I'm not surprised it
| gets inconsistent results. I'd wager the speedtest.net being
| longer was not decided for fun, but to get more consistent
| results.
|
| edit: Now I realize that the later tiny-small-medium filesize
| downloads also add to your above-the-fold download
| performance, so the results of the initial warm-up test are
| discarded later.
| neogodless wrote:
| I don't have Chrome installed, but on Windows / AMD, I get
| roughly comparable numbers between Edge (340/211) and Firefox
| (341/253).
| dsissitka wrote:
| Did you end up on the same server every time? The Atlanta
| server seems to be OK at the moment.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/SnA9rfH.png
| Shrezzing wrote:
| I think this is likely to be related to the way different
| browsers implement time.
|
| In an effort to improve security, browsers reduce fidelity &
| accuracy on results from the `performance.now()` timer methods.
| If you attempt to call `performance.now()`, and then call it
| again within 100 microseconds, your second result isn't
| guaranteed to be in the future compared to the first result.
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Performance...
|
| If you're implementing a speedtest feature, you'd likely run
| `performance.now()` iteratively as your high-resolution-timer,
| and compare that to the number of bytes downloaded. Browsers
| that perform more significant coarsing will return worse
| metric-per-second results in that scenario.
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| Cumulatively, these quirky edge cases make learning web dev
| very difficult.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| If you're interested in this then you might be interested in the
| global Internet quality data we are publishing:
| https://radar.cloudflare.com/quality and
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-radar-internet-quali...
| akino_germany wrote:
| Your layout is broken in everything but Chrome.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| I do not see an issue with Firefox or Safari on my machine.
| Feel free to email me (jgc@cloudflare.com) with what you are
| seeing.
| natrys wrote:
| Where I am, ISPs have arrangements to give intra-country traffic
| higher speed than inter-country. The nearest cloudflare PoP this
| chooses is always inside the country, so it gives misleading
| result.
| notRobot wrote:
| This is why it's important to consult multiple speed tests,
| because it's not really a general "internet speed test", rather
| a "connection speed test" with a particular server.
| bombcar wrote:
| I recently switched ISPs and went from something like 100mbs
| to 500mbs but because of how the new ISP peers some sites are
| actually slower now.
|
| Though the main ones I use now I can upload at 1000mbs so not
| going to complain too loud.
| jerrygenser wrote:
| I clicked the about link in the top right. I was pleasantly
| surprised that it was quite a good advertisement for cloudflare
| workers.
| uncertainrhymes wrote:
| The level of detail is very nice, I wish more tools exposed this
| as easily.
|
| That said, please remember this is a test of you through your ISP
| to a (hopefully) nearby Cloudflare node. It isn't necessarily
| testing 'the Internet', since Cloudflare sometimes has creative
| peering relationships to origins that are not being measured
| here.
|
| Also, for the people complaining they only have 300 Mb/s --
| unless you are streaming multiple 4K movies there is nothing
| faster about having more bandwidth. You should care about
| latency, packet loss, and cache hit rate.
| capableweb wrote:
| > unless you are streaming multiple 4K movies there is nothing
| faster about having more bandwidth
|
| Well, having a good network card and frequently downloading
| large files (which I'm guessing lots of people do here,
| especially those in ML/AI and related fields), I'm not sure why
| the downloads wouldn't go faster if you didn't have more
| bandwidth... People use the internet for more than just
| watching movies you know.
| Arelius wrote:
| Yeah, for sure, I'm often syncing multi gigabyte repositories
| while me and my wife are on video conferences. You really
| feel the extra bandwidth then.
| nrb wrote:
| > Also, for the people complaining they only have 300 Mb/s --
| unless you are streaming multiple 4K movies there is nothing
| faster about having more bandwidth. You should care about
| latency, packet loss, and cache hit rate.
|
| Haven't downloaded any 150+ GB games (or patches even these
| days) off of Steam lately I see
| sushisource wrote:
| Yeah. Comcast is shorting me by a solid 50Mb/s and this is
| the reason it's annoying. On top of the fact that their
| garbage excuse for a website is literally completely broken.
| Every time I've tried to use it for the past year it just
| sticks me in a login loop. What a truly miserable company.
| skazazes wrote:
| I recently discovered that using the Verizon website on
| Firefox is pretty much impossible, it similarly has
| nightmarish login/account issues. Whatever issue the
| browser has with the site even managed to break their new
| account flow on two installations I've had done in recent
| months. The installation and appointments were scheduled
| and performed, but nobody in their support teams can find
| either account in their systems and I have not received a
| bill.
|
| 1Gb symmetric at both locations in NYC though and a free
| Xbox One S and $300 Visa giftcard.
|
| They have essentially paid me to use them as my ISP, and
| contact from their support teams attempting to figure it
| out is getting increasingly infrequent
| xp84 wrote:
| Congrats! Once in a while, the stupidity in systems like
| this finally works in your favor.
| danpalmer wrote:
| I think the parent comment is still mostly relevant here.
| 150GB downloads are not common even for those with games that
| big. A new install is most likely a ~monthly operation and
| updates that aren't ready by the time you notice them will be
| rare.
|
| Sure it would be nice for those few instances, but those are
| not worth the additional cost for almost any individual or
| family if they actually work out the time saved waiting.
| networkchad wrote:
| [dead]
| askvictor wrote:
| You also probably need some internal/LAN speed measurement tools.
| When your wifi link is over-crowded, measuring your uplink isn't
| much use. I use iperf3.
| bombcar wrote:
| Many hosting/VPS providers run iperf3 servers you can hit,
| which can be useful.
|
| Why, here's some now!
|
| https://github.com/R0GGER/public-iperf3-servers
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| Historically this service is known for being highly incorrect.
| eviks wrote:
| No way to use bytes instead of bits in the output?
| cpfohl wrote:
| Not how it's usually measured...link speed is pretty much
| always in bits/s
| eviks wrote:
| So what if it's usually bad?
| LoganDark wrote:
| I don't measure file size in bits. I don't want to
| multiply/divide by 8 when roughly estimating how long a
| download will take. I end up doing 10 instead for maximum
| ease and pessimism.
| bombcar wrote:
| At least it's no longer in baud.
| cpfohl wrote:
| Link speed has always been measured in bits/s or as sibling
| comment suggests baud which is, still, just bits per
| second.
|
| Obviously a huge part of this is marketing for modems,
| ISPs, network cards, etc. but it's consistent. The
| conversion to GB/s is fairly simple and doable with the
| super key, or super space on Mac in every modern OS...
|
| I agree with you that the difference is irritating, but
| wouldn't have done any different if I were Cloudflare.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > baud which is, still, just bits per second.
|
| Isn't the baud-rate the number of signal transitions per
| second? How that maps to bits per second depends on the
| wire encoding.
| cpfohl wrote:
| This is probably more accurate! I was relying on fuzzy
| memories from an era long past! Thanks for the
| correction.
| jsd1982 wrote:
| But it's not measuring link speed directly. It's measuring
| transfer rate through TCP which is byte oriented. It's not
| possible to receive partial bytes via TCP (or UDP for that
| matter).
| secondcoming wrote:
| Maybe it's because I'm using 5G as my home broadband, but it
| seems massively off when compared to Google's SpeedTest and
| SpeedTest.net
| mstade wrote:
| I tried this on my home wifi (fiber backend) and got scores in
| range with what I expect. Then I tried it again outside the
| house, a block away using a 5G connection and much to my surprise
| the bandwidth in downloading was MUCH better (almost 3x) and
| upload somewhat better (1.5x). The 5G connection had worse
| latency characteristics though, which is to be expected of
| course.
|
| Obviously this isn't an apples-to-apples comparison, but I
| mention it because I'm genuinely surprised that 5G works this
| well. I've read all the claims but this is the first time I
| measure it, and frankly if I didn't need lower latency I might've
| just considered ditching the fiber.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| LTE was like this for a year or two also, in the areas that got
| it deployed first before handsets using it were widely
| available. It was several times faster than wired consumer
| internet at the time, though I also remember the latency not
| being great.
|
| Then within a product cycle or two everyone's phones had it and
| it went back to normal. I'd expect a similar thing here enjoy
| it while it lasts I guess.
| grumpy_coder wrote:
| Would be nice to aggregate some of these together. One 'speed'
| has always been a bad proxy for all the different speeds you get
| from ISP local caches (that most companies can't get in), local
| COLO/CDN, regional AWS/Azure/etc... and us-east
| haivri wrote:
| Wow, the level of detail exposed here is the best I've seen,
| super useful.
| JimmaDaRustla wrote:
| The measured speeds are very inaccurate at times - it will often
| measure low on download and high on upload. Just used it and it
| rated my connection 277/48 on a 300/30 connection.
| jedisct1 wrote:
| What are speed tests that work from the command line?
| uncertainrhymes wrote:
| If you have easy access to an arbitrarily large file (or an
| online random file generator) curl has timing variables that
| can be exposed via the -w flag.
|
| e.g. Create a format file named curltime.txt containing:
|
| time_namelookup: %{time_namelookup}s\n time_connect:
| %{time_connect}s\n time_redirect: %{time_redirect}s\n
| time_starttransfer: %{time_starttransfer}s\n ----------\n
| time_total: %{time_total}s\n
|
| then
|
| curl -svo /dev/null -w "@curltime.txt"
| https://example.com/my_arbitrary_file
|
| Would result in something like:
|
| time_namelookup: 0.048205s time_connect: 0.079001s
| time_redirect: 0.000000s time_starttransfer: 0.377603s
| ---------- time_total: 0.412150s
| jedisct1 wrote:
| That doesn't provide any information about jitter, latency,
| packet loss, DNS, location, etc.
| sva_ wrote:
| Very cool site, wish there was a dark mode.
| tebbers wrote:
| Pretty much bang on for me. 202 down, 195 up where my ISP has
| sold me 200Mbps symmetric. CommunityFibre in London, UK.
| rishishah20 wrote:
| It's Awesome, giving almost right result
| sorenjan wrote:
| I have a 250 Mb/s connection, but this claims I have over 440
| Mb/s download speed. When looking closer at the details I get 250
| Mb/s on all tests except the 1 MB download, so it's probably
| because of some compression or caching or similar, but I don't
| get the point of the larger tests if they don't affect the final
| score. I have never downloaded anything faster than 250 Mb/s
| before, so this is not a good reflection of my actual internet
| speed.
| jonathanlydall wrote:
| I suspect that your line has a configured limit as opposed to
| physical limit of 250mb/s (perhaps the fibre equipment is
| capable of 500mb/s or something).
|
| I've seen this ever since I moved to fibre about 8 years ago,
| I've never taken the fastest packages and whenever I test on
| speedtest.net it always starts off exceeding my limit, then
| comes down to my limit over a short while.
|
| The limiter for you may very well allow you to burst for a
| limited duration, so your speed on 1MB files are possibly at
| 440mb/s, but once you have sustained line usage it brings you
| down to your limit. I wouldn't know if this is an intentional
| feature or just because of how the limiter solution is
| implemented that it needs to sample over a certain period of
| time.
|
| It is a slightly useful behaviour if you're browsing the web
| and only occasionally clicking links which land up being
| downloaded way faster than your normal limit, but as you're
| only getting this speed if you do little to nothing for the 10s
| or 100s of seconds between opening pages, it doesn't have any
| negative effects over all.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's actually quite a hard problem to limit a fast physical
| connection to a slower speed for a burst - so much so that
| some tests are much easier with an old 10/100 hub.
|
| What's nice is when you pay for a certain speed and they give
| you more if nobody's using the excess. That's more rare now
| but still can be encountered, especially on upload.
| sorenjan wrote:
| Then why is the 100 kB test the slowest, with a max speed of
| 115 Mb/s? And no upload test gets above 250 Mb/s.
|
| The speed is very clearly throttled by the ISP though, they
| sell a faster package that I don't need. I'm not complaining,
| I've just never seen this burst behavior anywhere else.
| tweenagedream wrote:
| This is because of the way tcp congestion control works. In
| order to achieve higher speeds, tcp has a "window" that
| grows, essentially the amount of data in flight, that has
| not yet been acknowledged by your client. That window
| doesn't open very wide in the 100kb test because it happens
| so quickly.
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| I have seen similar shaping. This gives a quick responsive
| browsing experience but throttles bigger downloads/streaming.
|
| It also can be implemented badly. Azure VNET peering had 200M
| level and 100M level. Where 200M level was 200M most of the
| time, whereas 100M level was 200M for 30s and 0M for the next
| 30s.
| oneshtein wrote:
| Provider turned on "burst mode" for your link, for better
| customer experience.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| The upload speed numbers are highly suspect. I have cable that
| shows 32Mbps on every test I've ever run and yet CF is showing an
| absurd 221Mbps
|
| [edit]
|
| I saw the more detailed information below. The high speed comes
| entirely from 2 outliers on the 1MB upload test; all of the 10MB
| tests were clustered around 32Mbps
|
| [edit2]
|
| I reran and got similar results again with 3 1MB uploads over
| 200Mbps and all other uploads clustered around 32Mbps
| remram wrote:
| Supports IPv6 too. That's a nice surprise.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| We've been massive advocates of IPv6 since at least 2012:
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/ipv6-challenge-to-the-web/
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