Why do these speed tests start out slow and then get faster over the course of a few seconds?
Is it something about the internet that means the speed changes so much over the course of the test?
Speed Test
41–50 of 216 posts
Re: Speed Test
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Got a source for ISPs doing that for fast.com? Fast.com is netflix, so the same argument applies there - if you get 300mbps on fast.com you should get it on netflix too
Indeed, that's part of what motivated netflix to make fast.com.
is it possible for ISP to distinguish Netflix video streams from connections to Fast.com ? (and throttle them differently)
PS: my latest ISP router doesn't let me change DNS to my local pi-hole. haven't explored all options yet - just got new one 2 days ago -- but currently my DNS queries are going to whatever is the default set by my ISP.
Re: Speed Test
#43305 Mbps for me. Cringy how slow internet connetivity is in the UK.
Are you in London? My 1Gbps link gives 800-900Mbps in these speed tests, and I'm fine with that. It's a pitty that some of that is unused because I need to use a VPN. When I lived in a small town, my 500Mbps would give me >400Mbps consistently.
MK area. I wish we had gigabit speeds available.
Re: Speed Test
#44There's no way I'm getting over 500Mbps on my Telekom phone data in this elevator right now. EDIT: fast.com is showing 1Gbps. There's no way that's true.
Are you on local 5G? I’ve seen numbers like that. And they often put things in the elevator shafts to prevent dropout.
Re: Speed Test
#45There's no way I'm getting over 500Mbps on my Telekom phone data in this elevator right now. EDIT: fast.com is showing 1Gbps. There's no way that's true.
Do you have 5G by chance? Have never really looked up 5G speeds until now, so I personally was suprised by what I found, but apparently the speeds can often be anywhere from 1Gbps to 10Gbps, so anywhere in that ballpark or possibly lower could be true.
> The theoretical maximum speeds of 5G are pretty groundbreaking — but we have a very long way to go before you’re likely to hit that kind of peak speed in the real world, regardless of your connected device. Depending on your 5G coverage, maximum download speeds *often* range from 1Gbps to 10Gbps, and latency, or the time it takes to send data, could go as low as 1 millisecond (ms). [1]
Re: Speed Test
#46Why do these speed tests start out slow and then get faster over the course of a few seconds? Is it something about the internet that means the speed changes so much over the course of the test?
It's a inherit effect of TCP congestion control. TCP slow start and Window Scaling.
Re: Speed Test
#47Where I am, ISPs have arrangements to give intra-country traffic higher speed than inter-country. The nearest cloudflare PoP this chooses is always inside the country, so it gives misleading result.
This is why it's important to consult multiple speed tests, because it's not really a general "internet speed test", rather a "connection speed test" with a particular server.
I recently switched ISPs and went from something like 100mbs to 500mbs but because of how the new ISP peers some sites are actually slower now.
Though the main ones I use now I can upload at 1000mbs so not going to complain too loud.
Re: Speed Test
#48Tried on several devices - it consistently under-reads. I'm on 500Mbps broadband. Ookla and fast.com show 350Mbps via WiFi. Cloudflare only 274Mbps. Similar results on Ethernet. Over 400Mbps on a proper speed test. Can't hit 300 on this. I assume their downstream is capped?
I've read that often ISPs make exceptions for Ookla and fast.com speed tests by removing any sort of throttling to produce the best possible test results. I expect it isn't as easy for ISPs to treat Cloudflare like this, as it just looks like normal internet traffic.
I think fast.com hits netflix's cache server. Pretty much all isps have one provided to them by netflix.
Re: Speed Test
#49I have a 250 Mb/s connection, but this claims I have over 440 Mb/s download speed. When looking closer at the details I get 250 Mb/s on all tests except the 1 MB download, so it's probably because of some compression or caching or similar, but I don't get the point of the larger tests if they don't affect the final score. I have never downloaded anything faster than 250 Mb/s before, so this is not a good reflection o…
I suspect that your line has a configured limit as opposed to physical limit of 250mb/s (perhaps the fibre equipment is capable of 500mb/s or something). I've seen this ever since I moved to fibre about 8 years ago, I've never taken the fastest packages and whenever I test on speedtest.net it always starts off exceeding my limit, then comes down to my limit over a short while. The limiter for you may very well allow…
It’s actually quite a hard problem to limit a fast physical connection to a slower speed for a burst - so much so that some tests are much easier with an old 10/100 hub.
What’s nice is when you pay for a certain speed and they give you more if nobody’s using the excess. That’s more rare now but still can be encountered, especially on upload.
Re: Speed Test
#50There's no way I'm getting over 500Mbps on my Telekom phone data in this elevator right now. EDIT: fast.com is showing 1Gbps. There's no way that's true.
Fast.com uses local Netflix instances for the data so if you near to one yea you can get high speeds. Also 5G might be in the building with you #tinfoilhat