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Ask Slashdot: An Accurate Broadband Speed Test?
First time accepted submitter kyrcant writes Is there a way to accurately really test my "broadband" connection? I don't trust the usual sites, the first ones I found via Google. I suspect (and found) that at least some of them are directly affiliated with ISPs, and I further suspect that traffic to those addresses is probably prioritized, so people will think they're getting a good deal. The speeds I experience are much, much slower than the speed tests show I'm capable of. For a while I thought it might be the sites themselves, but they load faster on my T-Mobile HTC One via 4G than on my laptop via WiFi through a cable modem connection. Is there a speed test site that has a variable or untraceable IP address, so that the traffic can't be prioritized by my ISP (call them "ConCazt")? If not, which sites are not in any way affiliated with ISPs? Is there a way to test it using YouTube or downloading a set file which can be compared to other users' results?
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Rent or trial a VPS. You can get them for literally a few pounds/dollars per month.
Put a large file on Apache on it.
Download the file from several places.
Rename the file on the server to check it's not cached.
The "upper limit" on this is then the VPS, which generally are connected direct to 100mbps lines in a datacenter somewhere. If you think it's limited by the VPS, get another from another provider. Or load up iptraf or some packet capture and see how it did.
Speedtest websites are indicative only, and are cheated on by some places. Your own website can't be cheated on - you will see the request coming in and can watch the outgoing traffic to see where the bottleneck lies.
UC Berkeley's NetAlyzr.
If your ISP doesn't fiddle with your traffic, a heavily seeded torrent will normally do a good job of saturating your connection.
That's because your ISP throttles Youtube and Netflix.
Other Libertarian here. ISPs are a product of government collusion (monopoly) practices. The further a government is away from me, the less I trust it.
That being said, we do not need MORE regulation of ISPs, we need out of the box thinking to reframe the last mile problem. I have NO problem with a local municipality running last mile service, as long as I get to choose which provider gets to my house. This would require Fiber to the premise, running back to a COLO that is rented (funded) out to service providers to provide ANYTHING they want to the customer. A choice of four or six providers at the COLO to choose from, and a simple Network VLAN change to change providers.
THIS would negate the need for ANY regulation. If Johnny Christian wants to have Jesus.net cable co, he can get it. If Mary Rotten wants all porn and drug channels, she is free to choose that. Comcast will be forced to stop playing games, because they will lose customers if they throttle YouTube and Netflix.
Almost all problems we have right now, are caused by last mile monopolies. Lets inject CHOICE, rather than regulation into the market.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
This would require Fiber to the premise, running back to a COLO that is rented (funded) out to service providers to provide ANYTHING they want to the customer. A choice of four or six providers at the COLO to choose from, and a simple Network VLAN change to change providers.
That's what they already have in Iceland, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands!
Libertarians dream of a world with X. Socialists live in that world.
I've done it. I've downloaded a large file from a friend that was taking forever, i.e. in the realm of two hours total time. A half hour in or so, I got sick of it and we both had bandwidth to spare. On a whim, he moved it to a folder on the exact same server called /speedtest/ and I tried again. The second download finished before the first one did and exceeded the bandwidth I was provided (my service is 2 MB/s and the file downloaded at over 3). Literally everything was the same, but one file downloaded at 3MB/s and finished in under 10 minutes and the other chugged along around 200KB/s.
You should try it yourself sometime. Just follow the speedtest.net directory structure.
I don't trust the usual sites, the first ones I found via Google. I suspect (and found) that at least some of them are directly affiliated with ISPs, and I further suspect that traffic to those addresses is probably prioritized, so people will think they're getting a good deal.
I just wanted to point out that they're not necessarily trying to trick you by running these speed tests. For one thing, if they wanted to trick you, they could always just compile a list of popular test sites and prioritize/uncap that traffic.
But it's actually somewhat valid for ISPs to provide tests that, in a sense, are biased. Let's say you have a Verizon connection. Verizon may want to provide a testing mechanism to make sure you're getting the advertised connection to their network, to make sure things are operating properly. If you have a slow connection to Slashdot, for example, that might just mean that Slashdot is slow. It might mean that your route to Slashdot has been saturated somehow, and that might not be Verizon's fault. There are a lot of things that could possibly go wrong that could cause your connection to Slashdot to be bad, and Verizon can't rely on that as a good test.
So what Verizon would want to do is provide a test that simply confirms that your connection to their network is running at advertised speeds, which would mean testing between your home computer and another machine on their network. If that is operating at advertised speeds, but your connection to some endpoint is slow, then the problem is probably between Verizon's network and the endpoint, and not between you and Verizon's network.
Won't work if it's widely known.
Speed test sites don't need to be in collusion. ISP's just prioritize their traffic. It's quite obvious with my ISP if I do speed test sites versus just finding something large to download from a cloud storage service.
The obvious issue with that thesis is that you can't prove that the cloud storage site itself is performing slowly due to a bottleneck where it peers with your provider (or many other possible reasons) and while some providers are generally better than others about managing internal bandwidth, none can be said to have ALL uncongested peering points to ALL local customers and this obviously will have the same negative impact on user experience as a locally congested network.
I've actually used the SpeedTest sites to help improve downloading of Linux DVD ISO images. When I started the download (FTP/HTTP download) the quoted time was well over 8 hours, and the transfer rate was abysmal (60KBps to 120KBps on a multi-MBps line). Out of curiosity I ran a speed test through DSLReports and then found that the download rate jumped to 300KBps. After a while it would drop back to down to the previous range; I'd run the speed test again and voila, but up it went. I ended up downloading the entire Linux DVD ISO in under 1hour.
FYI, that was on AT&T DSL - not uVerse, just plain DSL since that is all we can get in our apartment. So obviously the ISPs are padding the numbers; which is a natural outcome of the FCC wanting people to report the ISPs that are not holding up.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)