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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.)

4 of 294 comments (clear)

  1. ndt by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    NDT - Argonne National Laboratory
    ndt.anl.gov/

    Not associated with any ISP.

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

    Very detailed reports.

    1. 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.

  2. Re:VPS by TubeSteak · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    [Fuck Beta]
    o0t!
  3. Short answer: No by Morgor · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.