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

Comments

Really?

[Maxwell]

How are people not aware of DSLReports and their speed tests? And how could this possibly make /.?

Also, your wi-fi sucks. Get a cable if you want to know what your real speed is.

VPS

[ledow]

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.

Re:VPS

[TubeSteak]

Rent or trial a VPS. You can get them for literally a few pounds/dollars per month.

The old timey way of doing speed tests is to hit up FTPs and see what your max sustained speed is.

ndt

[Anonymous Coward]

NDT - Argonne National Laboratory
ndt.anl.gov/

Not associated with any ISP.

There are other ndt (network diagnostic tests) as well.

Very detailed reports.

Re:ndt

[Anonymous Coward]

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 use speedof.me

[AvitarX]

And frequently score higher on my tmobile phone than on comcast (up to 30 vs up to 15)

Re:Ask yourselves these questions... apk

[ColdWetDog]

All right. Just who woke him up this time? Whoever it is, you need to put him back down in his bunker and this time LOCK THE DOOR.

SamKnows from the FCC

[NevarMore]

https://www.samknows.com/

I have one of their boxes installed. It seems to provide a clear picture of overall performance with a monthly report. I'm doing this because I'd like to think it helps the FCC keep the ISPs honest.

PS - Card carrying Libertarian. No the FCC isn't spying on me, and yes regulation of ISPs is appropriate. If we've broken the free market by granting a local monopoly or limited oligopoly then heavy regulation is appropriate. Consumer choice is better, but this is the best we can do with what we have today.

Xfinity Speed Test

[jbov]

Use the Xfinity speed test at speedtest.comcast.net.
As far as I can tell, they are not affiliated with any ISP.

Short answer: No

[Morgor]

I'm a network engineer at an ISP, so I would say I have a bit of experience with this from both ends of the table. First of all, there's a difference between your broadband connection speed and your perceived rate. Your broadband connection might be capped to what you pay for, and, assuming your last-mile medium can handle that speed, that only means that you will never actually go beyond your connection speed.

Now as we know, the internet is a complicated network of interconnected systems. You are connected via your ISP's backbone to the other systems (ISPs, enterprises, content providers, etc.) via a number of internet peering points. These peering points have their own connection speed (typically 1 Gbit/s or 10 Gbit/s, although higher exist), and may or may not be utilised to their maximum extent at any point of time. This means that you may have your full data rate available to some destinations, while others may take a congested route.

You mention testing, and your frustration is very reasonable. There are testing sites out there, but you never have any idea about how many else might be testing at the same time, or how much load there is on the server at the moment of the test. If you are unlucky, you might also be limited by your hardware, your operating system (TCP Window Size, receive buffers and similar might not be tuned properly), or your router.

I would say your best choice would be to download as much as possible from as many sources as possible (bittorrent is excellent for this, but may be throttled by evil ISPs), and do this over a couple of days to get an average indication of how much your connection is capable of delivering.

If you have a server on some remote location via the internet, you can use programs like iperf to make a bandwidth test, but such a test is not exactly precise when you have no idea how the intermediate networks are.

Re:None

[malakai]

I like http://speedof.me/

It's fast, works with HTML5, works on mobile, tablet, desktop. As far as I can tell, it's hosted in the Amazon Cloud.

-frank

They're not necessarily trying to trick you

[nine-times]

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.