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

Selective throttling

[JustNiz]

I've long held a theory that my ISP (Cox) is limiting bandwidth selectively by site, and that they make all the benchmark sites wide open, but throttle others, like netflix.
It seems they have already added fast.com to their "Do not throttle" list but not added Netflix.

Who needs a test when you have real-life app data?

[Cajun Hell]

If this is primarily intended for Netflix users, then why not just have the client measure the speed of actual live use cases? Some games have an option to show frames per second; your streaming player could have an option that shows bits per second.

Download are done from nflxvideo.ne

[JcMorin]

I did a quick lookup and the download are made from: https://ipv4_1-cxl0-c273.1.nyc....... I believe this is the same domain as the real video so that would make it harder to block on "fast.com" since data are not downloaded from that domain name.

Re:Works great

[whipslash]

Here's another good one that doesn't require Flash or Silverlight but gives a lot more details: https://www.voipreview.org/spe...