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Fast.com is a lot slower than both speedtest.net and http://speedtest.dslreports.com/speedtest for me... I get 78mbps on fast.com and 350 on the other two. Not sure what's going on? Maybe they don't have servers near me, I'm in Paris, France.
First, I thought why another speed test, then I saw that they link their results directly to speedtest.net (the reference) and finally, I realized that fast.com is so much faster in detecting the download speed (but lacks upload and ping). Not bad. EDIT: And they secured a fantastic domain.
Why not also measure upload speed? I get it, it's because their business model only requires people to download stuff. The current state of the internet is much like the old days, where only big corporations had the ability to "broadcast". So I'm not enthusiastic at all.
Fast.com is a lot slower than both speedtest.net and http://speedtest.dslreports.com/speedtest for me... I get 78mbps on fast.com and 350 on the other two. Not sure what's going on? Maybe they don't have servers near me, I'm in Paris, France.
It's a little odd that they elected to invent their own way of requesting just a range of bytes in a file. It's built into HTTP: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7233
Perhaps it mitigates against proxies stripping the headers, or it simplifies caching.
Speed testing is a good starting point, but on my LTE connection (rural area) I find the latency to be very contributor to overall experience. Especially that once the link is saturated the latency shoots through the roof (up to x10). I wish there were some tools for testing more complex use cases.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the point was they conduct the speed test from the same servers that deliver video content. So ISPs can't throttle video streaming without it showing up in this speed test.
If it's intentional throttling, fast.com would actually not be much of a problem. It'd still be easy to selectively apply traffic shaping to streaming but not to the speedtest traffic. It would be harder (though not impossible) if there is an actual capacity problem, and the bottleneck is outside of the ISP's network. For example insufficient peering capacity, which seems to be where most of the Netflix / ISP frictio…
That presumes they aren't fully emulating streaming traffic to test speed. Not only is this the correct thing to do from a video streaming company that wants to test connection speed for their services (the quantity and size of packets can affect the delivery through different mediums and devices), but it also makes it obvious when your ISP is quietly throttling your video streaming traffic.
Since it's a win-win in this respect, I would be surprised if this isn't exactly what they are doing.
1. When will someone build a tool like this and then open up the measurements data? A speed-measuring tool would be infinitely more useful if we could investigate the results beyond just our one device for one test. A question I really want to be able to answer: which ISP offers the fastest service in my area? fast.com and speedtest.net could easily answer this question if they made the data available. 2. I think tes…
Google / YouTube has a 'Video Quality Report' which will measure your speeds and will also show local ISPs speeds as well. https://www.google.com/get/videoqualityreport/
You can also run fast.com from the command-line: https://github.com/sindresorhus/fast-cli
fast | cat
860 MbpsFirst, I thought why another speed test, then I saw that they link their results directly to speedtest.net (the reference) and finally, I realized that fast.com is so much faster in detecting the download speed (but lacks upload and ping). Not bad. EDIT: And they secured a fantastic domain.