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

Works great

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

No Flash, no Silverlight, got my cable download speed accurately.

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...

Translation:

[Sir_Eptishous]

NF: "See, we TOOOLLLDDD you it was your ISP!

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.

Re:Selective throttling

[wile_e_wonka]

You've got it backward. They haven't "already added fast.com" to the whitelist, they just haven't added it to the "throttle list." Netflix gets throttled, bittorrent gets throttled, speed test sites and most other sites don't get put on the "throttle list."

That said, I have Cox on the 100 MB/sec down plan and have not had any throttling issues, even when well above their soft data cap.

Re:Selective throttling

[JustNiz]

I don't see how not using their DNS changes anything.
I'll bet they are resoliving the selective throttling to IP addresses at some level prior to the actual decision point.

Re: Selective throttling

[JustNiz]

Link please? then I can get actual metrics to backup my theory

Re:Selective throttling

[omnichad]

I'm pretty sure Google's Public DNS uses anycast IP addresses. Meaning you'll probably still get the closest server in the results. A lot of CDNs do the same thing.

Re:Better watch it.

[funwithBSD]

Then don't buy anything.
Problem solved.

Seriously, I would never buy from a company that came to me, that goes for online or offline. I do my research, find the product that is best fit and price I can afford.

Re:How long before the ISPs...

[Gr8Apes]

3s isn't nearly long enough. I know that U-verse, for instance, doesn't kick in throttling your connection down to the "maximum" for about 5s, so if you have a largish file that can be squeezed into a 4s burst, your file gets transferred in 4s. Double the size, and it may take 30s. Yes, the differences are that dramatic.

Never stop never stopping

[pr0t0]

Could not reach our servers to perform the test. You may not be connected to the internet

If I wasn't connected to the internet, I wouldn't see the page indicating I may not be connected to the internet.

Re:Better watch it.

[Sir_Eptishous]

Netflix wins, I win, the ISP loses through their customer base having another data point to how they are being screwed. I see no problem with this.

How do you win when you can't get your ISP to change who/what they throttle and there is no competition for ISPs?

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.

VPN Users Affected

[ZeroNullVoid]

With this using Netflix's servers and their VPN blocking, I get the following error when testing via various VPNs.

* Could not reach our servers to perform the test. You may not be connected to the internet

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.

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.

slow.com

[sims 2]

Since we are discussing fast.com does anyone know the story behind slow.com it says Welcome to Comcast! in google search results but it says Welcome to Time Warner Cable! if you visit it.

Did they set that up or was it someone's idea of a joke to redirect that domain?

Re:Suspiciously big differences? Or not?

[Ingenium13]

Do you have binge on enabled? If so, that will throttle Netflix connections. It's enabled by default on all accounts unless you go in and disable it.

Re:Works pretty well

[tattood]

The 'whoosh' here is that he's being pedantic about the fact that data transfers are usually measured in megabits per second (Mbps) not megabytes per second (MBps)

Re:Works pretty well

[citylivin]

"That's literally the only test you can trust."

i find speedof.me to be very reliable. It tests differently then the other tests, trying to simulate actual traffic.

http://speedof.me/