After a reliable broadband speed tester

[Jawloms]

Which do you use and trust? Our broadband feels slow this morning. We are on a 100mb lease line. speedtest.net says I'm getting 70mb down, but Google's own speedtest says I'm getting 7mb. I'd expect a little variation between different ones, but that much?

 

Stuart

[SchoolsBroadband]

We recommend speedtest.net We have our own speedtest server you can select but you can also use others ones hosted by other ISPs.

 

Dave

[IT_JB]

I've started to use https://speed.cloudflare.com/ more these days, it seems more accurate to me. I've also found the auto selected speedtest.net server can have a big impact.

[simpsonj]

I tend to run ping 8.8.8.8 -t and check the time. If it starts averaging over 20/30ms then I know our broadband is slowing down, if it hits triple digits everyone will know about it!

[chazzy2501]

fast.com is what I use.

[Jawloms]

We recommend speedtest.net We have our own speedtest server you can select but you can also use others ones hosted by other ISPs.

 

Dave

 

I'll bet you do. I'm with SchoolsBroadband, and it's that one telling me it's nice and quick! cloudfare, fast.com and Google all tell me it's less than 10, speedtest.net is saying it's 70+.

Edited May 12, 2022 by Jawloms

[chazzy2501]

fast.com was made by netflix to prove that ISPs were throttling their traffic.

[Chaton]

Typically I use https://speed.cloudflare.com/ or Google's, but I've noticed that some ISP's are providing their own speed test sites and I'm hesitant to trust those.

[SchoolsBroadband]

I'll bet you do. I'm with SchoolsBroadband, and it's that one telling me it's nice and quick! cloudfare, fast.com and Google all tell me it's less than 10, speedtest.net is saying it's 70+.

 

 

If you use a speedtest server not on our network then that should give you some comfort.

 

Another way is to get torrenting and try download something like some large ISO images from educational establishments or some linux distributions as they're generally on very fast links. You'll then make lots of connections all over the place which should eventually start maxing out your line if you have enough sessions open.

 

I can guarantee we do no throttling what so ever on our network!

 

Finally you may also want to look at what port(s) you connect on with different speedtest servers as this could also have an effect.

 

Thanks

 

Dave

[Michael]

Which do you use and trust? Our broadband feels slow this morning. We are on a 100mb lease line. speedtest.net says I'm getting 70mb down, but Google's own speedtest says I'm getting 7mb. I'd expect a little variation between different ones, but that much?

 

Stuart

 

Software/website aside, the most accurate way is to connect a LAN cable directly into your router at source and choose a quiet time.

 

If you want to be even more accurate, perform the above and disconnect your whole LAN, so you're isolated to one device with a static IP.

 

If you're getting as low as 7Mb/s, then I'd ask to see reports of actual usage. It could well be you need to increase it from 100Mb/s > 200Mb/s or more as your budget allows, or there is something fundamentally wrong. Surely end users would be complaining of lag?

[jthompson]

All the adverts on speedtest.net give me the ick, but I guess it's still functionally useful.

 

Whilst I've never used it, speedtest.net does appear to offer a CLI client that I suppose you could use to script regular tests or integrate into a monitoring platform somehow. https://www.speedtest.net/apps/cli

[SchoolsBroadband]

Software/website aside, the most accurate way is to connect a LAN cable directly into your router at source and choose a quiet time.

 

If you want to be even more accurate, perform the above and disconnect your whole LAN, so you're isolated to one device with a static IP.

 

If you're getting as low as 7Mb/s, then I'd ask to see reports of actual usage. It could well be you need to increase it from 100Mb/s > 200Mb/s or more as your budget allows, or there is something fundamentally wrong. Surely end users would be complaining of lag?

 

you are 100% right. if you test speeds in the day time there will always be background traffic so you'll never get the full speeds out of your line at that time.

 

Dave

[Norphy]

All the adverts on speedtest.net give me the ick, but I guess it's still functionally useful.

 

Whilst I've never used it, speedtest.net does appear to offer a CLI client that I suppose you could use to script regular tests or integrate into a monitoring platform somehow. https://www.speedtest.net/apps/cli

 

I was going to say something along those lines. I found with the Speedtest website that the sheer amount of of adverts and the load that those adverts put on your browser often makes the speed reading they give unreliable. There have been multiple occasions where I have ran Speedtest on a computer and got one result then, a minute later with an ad-blocker enabled, a speed test to the same server brings back a wildly different result. Then if I use one of their apps which don't have so many adverts, they generally come back with similar results to the ad-blocked browser.

 

I think their service is basically sound but the website could be better. I generally use fast.com these days, assuming Netflix isn't being blocked anyway.

[slugshead]

Speedtest.net via the CLI

 

or fast.com

[andy_b]

Have used the "Large Test files" from here in the past. Not sure what the max d/l is, but certainly maxes 100Mbit:

 

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/download

[mrstrong]

I tend to use https://speedtest.btwholesale.com/ and https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest

also get test files from https://fastest.fish/test-files

and test e.g. upload here https://www.azurespeed.com/Azure/UploadLargeFile

[nicholab]

Think broadband speed test!

[MYK-IT]

https://speedtest.samknows.com/

 

If router is compatible, or you may be able to get a free Whitebox, you could also use https://samknows.com/realspeed/