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Ask Slashdot: An Accurate Broadband Speed Test?

Posted by timothy on from the works-fine-from-our-end-sir dept.

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? (Have your own question for the teeming masses? Ask away — be sure to include appropriate detail and context — via the Slashdot submission form.)

3 of 294 comments (clear)

  1. VPS by ledow · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:ndt by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. They're not necessarily trying to trick you by nine-times · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.