Speed tests

[Irwell]

Are those free Internet Speed Tests any good.

 

[Nil]

Are those free Internet Speed Tests any good.

That one over there is pretty good, but that other one sucks.

 

[Gene E. Bloch]

That one over there is pretty good, but that other one sucks.

I like two out of these three.

 

[Tony]

Not as good as being on usenet.

Are those free Internet Speed Tests any good.

--
The Grandmaster of the CyberFROG

Come get your ticket to CyberFROG city

Nay, Art thou decideth playeth ye simpleton games. *Some* of us know
proper manners

Very few. I used to take calls from *rank* noobs but got fired the first
day on the job for potty mouth,

Bur-ring, i'll get this one: WHAT'S YOUR PROBLEM JERK!!? We're here to
help you dickweed, ok, ok give the power cord the jiggily piggily
wiggily all the while pushing the power button repeatedly now take
everything out of your computer except the power supply and *one* stick
of ram. Ok get the next sucker on the phone.

Deirdre Straughan (Roxio) is a LIAR (Deirdre McFibber)

There's the employer and the employee and the FROGGER and the FROGEE,
which one are you?

Hamster isn't a newsreader it's a mistake!

El-Gonzo Jackson FROGS both me and Chuckcar (I just got EL-FROG-OED!!)

All hail Chuckcar the CZAR!! Or in F-R-O-Gland Chuckcar laCZAR,
ChuckCZAR!!

I hate them both, With useless bogus bullshit you need at least *three*
fulltime jobs to afford either one of them

I'm a fulltime text *only* man on usenet now. The rest of the world
downloads the binary files not me i can't afford thousands of dollars a
month

VBB = Volume based billing. How many bytes can we shove down your throat
and out your arse sir?

The only "fix" for the CellPig modem is a sledgehammer.

UBB = User based bullFROGGING

Master Juba was a black man imitating a white man imitating a black man

Always do incremental backups of your data or you'll end up like the
A-Holes at DSL Reports. Justin says i made a boo-boo. Yeah boo-who.

Updates are for idiots. As long as the thing works there's no reason to
turn
schizophrenic and develop a lifelong complex over such a silly issue.

Adrian "jackpot" Lewis is a mama's boy!

Jimmy Fricke is good for the game of poker

Using my technical prowess and computer abilities to answer questions
beyond the realm of understandability

Regards Tony... Making usenet better for everyone everyday

This sig file was compiled via my journeys through usenet

 

[Char Jackson]

I like two out of these three.

Four out of five dentists recommend this one.

 

[ray]

Are those free Internet Speed Tests any good.

I've found the ones I've tried to be reasonably accurate and fairly
repeatable.

 

[Dave \Crash\ Dummy]

Are those free Internet Speed Tests any good.

They work pretty well, just remember that what you are measuring is the
slowest link in the chain, not your browser or probably your ISP. Pick
several locations close to home.

 

[jbm]

"Irwell" wrote in message

Are those free Internet Speed Tests any good.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Not if you've got a fibre connection. Hardly any of the servers can keep
up!!! I can manage over 70mbps download (BT Infinity 2), but most servers in
the UK report under 40.

jim

 

[VanguardLH]

Are those free Internet Speed Tests any good.

Depends on the hosts (nodes) in the route between you and the speed test
site. If your ISP provides their own speed test web page then use that.
It will reflect what is your speed that your ISP provides. Once outside
their network (e.g., speedtest.net) then they cannot guarantee the
performance of networks owned and operated by others. Your ISP is the
only one that can [try to] guarantee the speed they contract with you.
Anything outside their network is whatever you happen to get.

You might also find the closest test node the speed site recommends
might not provide the fastest results. A hop (host/node) between you
and that site could be slow, busy, or throttled. A farther site might
give faster results.

 

[Chris S.]

Try this one: speedtest.net.

http://www.speedtest.net/result/2011278155.png

Chris

 

[Irwell]

Are those free Internet Speed Tests any good.

Depends on the hosts (nodes) in the route between you and the speed test
site. If your ISP provides their own speed test web page then use that.
It will reflect what is your speed that your ISP provides. Once outside
their network (e.g., speedtest.net) then they cannot guarantee the
performance of networks owned and operated by others. Your ISP is the
only one that can [try to] guarantee the speed they contract with you.
Anything outside their network is whatever you happen to get.

You might also find the closest test node the speed site recommends
might not provide the fastest results. A hop (host/node) between you
and that site could be slow, busy, or throttled. A farther site might
give faster results.

Thanks for detailed explanation, I use AT&T and their speed test
was faster than others tested, I thought maybe there was some bias
on the other sites to get a person to change their ISP, but your
explanation makes sense.

 

[charlie]

I like two out of these three.

I believe my IP has figured out how to "game" the test results.
Seems that many of the popular tests show speeds well in excess of any
achievable file download speed.

 

[VanguardLH]

I believe my IP has figured out how to "game" the test results. Seems
that many of the popular tests show speeds well in excess of any
achievable file download speed.

Speeds outside your provider cannot be guaranteed for bandwidth by your
provider. That's obvious. Your provider doesn't own or operate the
networks outside their own network.

Do you have a file that you can download from your ISP? Not some
security software they recommend since that comes from elsewhere, like
from the security product's vendor or some worldwide mesh network of
data centers providing file services. You can only measure the speed
with your provider using files from their servers. Anything outside on
off-domain networks can not obviously be guaranteed by your provider.

Also, how do you know the file servers you are using aren't being
throttled? They have to provide responsiveness to a multitude of
concurrent connections so it is likely that after some number of
concurrent connections that they have to reduce bandwidth to some or all
of them. If they let just one connection suck up all their available
bandwidth then all the other users also trying to use their file server
would crawl or hang.

Speed tests won't tell you how a particular site might throttle the
bandwidth to all concurrent connections to ensure some response to all
of those that are allowed at once. Resources are not infinite at any
site. Every connection gets just some portion of their resources.
Unless you have a dedicated file server that only you can use that has
an equal or greater bandwidth than your own and there is only 1 hop
between you and that file server (i.e., the route goes direct from your
host to the file server), you will either get equal or usually achieve
less speed than the speed test sites will allude that you can obtain.

Then there's the issue of speed boosting (e.g., Comcast's PowerBoost)
which only works for a maximum number of bytes. It is designed for web
browsing to boost how fast web page content gets delivered to you (but
still depends on the speed on intervening hosts in the route between you
and the web server and any throttling at the web server). It isn't
designed to speed up file transfer unless the files are under 10MB
(rather small considering the size of most installers these days). The
speed site, especially the ISP providing the speed boost, may reflect
the effects of that speed boost whereas you won't get it during a normal
file download. That speed boost also probably only applies to HTTP
traffic so NNTP for newsgroups, FTP for file transfer, ICMP for pinging,
POP/IMAP/SMTP for e-mail, and other non-HTTP communication protocols may
not benefit from the speed boost.

Comcast High-Speed Internet FAQ (mentions PowerBoost)
http://www.dslreports.com/faq/14520

Most speed sites just give an average value for bandwidth (downstream
and upstream). That means you won't see the big change for bandwidth
when their testing for file download speed uses test files that exceed
the 10MB max boosting size. However, often they don't have any files
that exceed that size or just 1 over that size so their results are
skewed by the speed boosting provided by the ISP.

 

[Stephen Wolstenholme]

Are those free Internet Speed Tests any good.

http://www.speedtest.net/ is OK.

Steve

 

[Jeff Layman]

"Irwell" wrote in message

Are those free Internet Speed Tests any good.

Must be pretty cramped living in that BT cabinet...

 

[Char Jackson]

Then there's the issue of speed boosting (e.g., Comcast's PowerBoost)
which only works for a maximum number of bytes. <snip>

That speed boost also probably only applies to HTTP
traffic so NNTP for newsgroups, FTP for file transfer, ICMP for pinging,
POP/IMAP/SMTP for e-mail, and other non-HTTP communication protocols may
not benefit from the speed boost.

Comcast's PowerBoost is protocol agnostic.

 

[J. P. Gilliver (John)]

Try this one: speedtest.net.

I've got as far using that as clicking to begin; now it's sitting at
SELECTING BEST SERVER BASED ON PING, and has been for several minutes.

From http://www.mybroadbandspeed.co.uk/, I've got my usual fairly
consistent response (5640 down, 378 up; I usually get nearer, or
sometimes just over, 6000, which is fair for a plain line in a rural
location). I've used http://www.mybroadbandspeed.co.uk/ at other
people's houses, and got responses that seem to me to reflect their
connection speed - certainly fairly consistent (I've seen about 1500 and
2500) if tried repeatedly from the same house.

I'd be interested to hear what it gives for someone from leftpondia.

(Speedtest still stuck. Probably fallen foul of some filter I have set
up: doesn't use facebook or anything does it?)
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G.5AL-IS-P--Ch++(p)Ar@T0H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

The message ... is that Americans talk a lot abour freedom but are scared of
anyone who tries to exhibit it. - Barry Norman on "Easy Rider", in Radio Times
28 April-4 May 2012

 

[J. P. Gilliver (John)]

Try this one: speedtest.net.

I've got as far using that as clicking to begin; now it's sitting at
SELECTING BEST SERVER BASED ON PING, and has been for several minutes.

From http://www.mybroadbandspeed.co.uk/, I've got my usual fairly []
(Speedtest still stuck. Probably fallen foul of some filter I have set
up: doesn't use facebook or anything does it?)

Try choosing a server.

OK. I go to speedtest.net. I see a big rectangle with an f in it: fair
enough, that's because I have something that blocks flash stuff until I
click it. So I click it. I get LOADING 100% for a few tens of seconds,
then something that looks a bit like a laptop; where the keyboard would
be is a map of the world, and where the screen would be is a map of
northwest Europe, and a big button that says BEGIN TEST. I click that.
The map of nw EU zooms out a bit and the button is replaced with
SELECTING BEST SERVER BASED ON PING - and nothing else happens. Nothing
about choosing a server.
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G.5AL-IS-P--Ch++(p)Ar@T0H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

The message ... is that Americans talk a lot abour freedom but are scared of
anyone who tries to exhibit it. - Barry Norman on "Easy Rider", in Radio Times
28 April-4 May 2012

 

[Dave \Crash\ Dummy]

Try this one: speedtest.net.

I've got as far using that as clicking to begin; now it's sitting
at SELECTING BEST SERVER BASED ON PING, and has been for several
minutes.

From http://www.mybroadbandspeed.co.uk/, I've got my usual fairly
[]
(Speedtest still stuck. Probably fallen foul of some filter I
have set up: doesn't use facebook or anything does it?)

Try choosing a server.

OK. I go to speedtest.net. I see a big rectangle with an f in it:
fair enough, that's because I have something that blocks flash stuff
until I click it. So I click it. I get LOADING 100% for a few tens of
seconds, then something that looks a bit like a laptop; where the
keyboard would be is a map of the world, and where the screen would
be is a map of northwest Europe, and a big button that says BEGIN
TEST. I click that. The map of nw EU zooms out a bit and the button
is replaced with SELECTING BEST SERVER BASED ON PING - and nothing
else happens. Nothing about choosing a server.

Click on one of the little white dots on the map.

Speedtest.net was a lot better before they added all this flash crap.

Re: http://www.mybroadbandspeed.co.uk/ from the New World

"Sorry - My Broadband Speed is currently experiencing technical
difficulty and may display misleading test results. Thanks for bearing
with us while we fix things."

In any event, the meter shows a top speed of 6 Mb/s, which would not
handle my 30 Mb/s download speed.

 

[Stephen Wolstenholme]

Try this one: speedtest.net.

I've got as far using that as clicking to begin; now it's sitting at
SELECTING BEST SERVER BASED ON PING, and has been for several minutes.

From http://www.mybroadbandspeed.co.uk/, I've got my usual fairly []
(Speedtest still stuck. Probably fallen foul of some filter I have set
up: doesn't use facebook or anything does it?)

Try choosing a server.

OK. I go to speedtest.net. I see a big rectangle with an f in it: fair
enough, that's because I have something that blocks flash stuff until I
click it. So I click it. I get LOADING 100% for a few tens of seconds,
then something that looks a bit like a laptop; where the keyboard would
be is a map of the world, and where the screen would be is a map of
northwest Europe, and a big button that says BEGIN TEST. I click that.
The map of nw EU zooms out a bit and the button is replaced with
SELECTING BEST SERVER BASED ON PING - and nothing else happens. Nothing
about choosing a server.

If I allow speedtest.net to do everything for me it finds the nearest
server run by XILO in Manchester. If I want to use a different server
I can do but the XILO server is my nearest host. Speedtest is good at
measuring speed but the site itself is very slow.

Steve