![]() Of course we feel these tricks are dirty tactics and dishonest and need to be disallowed in our industry. Unfortunately its the consumer that loses out as this fake presentation of speed only serves the gaining ISP. Some ISP’s have been making themselves look good on the Speed Test websites by downgrading traffic from competitors (like us) in order to generate more sales. Think about the VW emissions scandal and how they created “defeat devices” in order to fool the tests. You can run tests yourself on both and see the huge difference in reported speeds, all by changing out Adobe Flash.Īnti-competitive Measures We now often see ISP’s deliberately slowing down traffic from a competitor in a bid to make themselves look better. Well, that also affects your speed test results. Firefox doesn’t even support Flash anymore, that tells you how outdated that technology is. The Speed Test Websites Themselves Some sites runs on the outdated Adobe Flash, and some without Flash. This is because many providers have either throttled back the amount of “free” bandwidth that they are using for their servers, or have decided only to support up the likes of 100MB as that is the highest speed that the provider currently supports to their customers.Ī good example is BT’s own Broadband Performance Test, in which even they say it cannot be tested for connections above 330MB. We generally find that when you try to test anything over 100MB, many sites bottom out and say its only 100MB when it could be even 500Mb that you have. Many speed test sites were designed for consumer grade ADSL (asymmetrical) – not wide band and fully synchronous lines. It also had high latency, and was running over SSL so had those overheads too which degrade speeds. Many volunteers who host the speed test servers don’t have dedicated bandwidth set aside to actually deliver the bandwidth you need for that test, as quite often volunteers tend to use spare bandwidth that is not being used at that time, a concept which of course is fundamentally flawed. We found that more accurate than some, but when we tested it, it was capped at 90Mbps download and 150Mbps upload, but totally useless for 100Mbps+ lines. Think of a car race whereby your car does 200 mph but the one measuring you can only do 100 mph, once you go over 100 Mph, how can the testing car say you did or didn’t manage to get to 200 mph? Quite often the server is connected on a 1Gbps or 10Gbps connection, but if there are 50 other people using it at the same time, how can it actually test you at say 350 Mbps if it does not have it to give? The Speed Test Server’s Connection The connection between you and the Speed Test server might not be capable of measuring the speed you require, for example, the servers bandwidth might already be used up providing other Speed Test measurements to others. In this case, the Speed Test server simply does not have the bandwidth in the first place to measure your speeds. During busy times, the Speed Test server itself may actually be too busy (serving other speed tests to other users) to serve you in any reliable way and can produce inaccurate results. The Speed Test Server Itself Quite often the actual speed test servers are hosted in a virtualised environment, meaning that the owners are running many servers on a single physical computer. Here is a breakdown of what can affect your reported speed: It’s not our intention to compete against a volunteer hosting a website in return for adverting money.Īll the speed-test website’s actually do is download a small set of files from a remote server and provide a number or dial on the screen as a “guesstimate”, but it doesn’t have any scientific calculations behind it.īy doing the test, your not actually testing your internet speed, your performing a test to a specific server somewhere on the internet, a place in which you’ll probably never visit again, i.e as part of your normal usage. Speed Test sites are usually hosted by volunteers who use “spare” bandwidth on their network in return for free advertising or to help their own customers achieve better speed results. Speed test sites were really on designed to give an indicative idea and not conclusive answer and are volunteered by other people with no guarantee or SLA as to their capability, so therefore cannot be relied on. We often get asked by customers as to why speeds vary across the various website speed tests and also in some cases misreport the actual speeds being delivered to a customer. There are many reasons why such sites are not as accurate as one may think.
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