Netflix Launches Fast.com To Show How Fast Your Internet Connection Really Is (venturebeat.com)

Paul Sawers, writing for VentureBeat (condensed): Netflix really wants to show you how fast (or slow) your Internet connection is, and to do so it has launched a new website at Fast.com that conveys the real-time speed of your connection to the Web. It's designed to give people "greater insight and control of their Internet service." Netflix said it was for: Providing a website featuring non-downloadable software for testing and analyzing the speed of a user's Internet connection, as well as downloadable computer software for testing and analyzing the speed of a user's Internet connection.Compared to Speedtest.net, Fast.com doesn't offer any details on how fast is your upload speeds, what's the ping time, and any detail on location and ISP. However, it's seemingly faster, and automatically detects your download speeds when you visit the website.

Comments

Re:Works pretty well

[phishybongwaters]

Your burst speed means nothing. I was going well beyond my DSL cap if I only cared about burst speed, the EFFECTIVE speed is considerably lower. Any speed test site is only as good as the infrastructure, and once it's popular, ISPs will unthrottle connections to that service, much like they have agreed to do with netflix, and it becomes speedtest.net version 2. If you want to test your speed to the internet, reliably, you have 1 choice. Host a webserver yourself somewhere, and upload files to it. That's literally the only test you can trust.

Re:I don't think so

[bruce_the_loon]

Browsers and Bittorrent clients report download speeds in kilobytes or megabytes per second, this site reports download speed in megabits per second. 1 megabyte per second is around 8 to 9 megabits per second given overheads. Your 5 megabit/s line will reflect in the browser as 600 kilobytes per second, so the site is confirming your experiences.