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Speed Test

speed.cloudflare.com

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Re: Speed Test

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Then why is the 100 kB test the slowest, with a max speed of 115 Mb/s? And no upload test gets above 250 Mb/s. The speed is very clearly throttled by the ISP though, they sell a faster package that I don't need. I'm not complaining, I've just never seen this burst behavior anywhere else.

This is because of the way tcp congestion control works. In order to achieve higher speeds, tcp has a "window" that grows, essentially the amount of data in flight, that has not yet been acknowledged by your client. That window doesn't open very wide in the 100kb test because it happens so quickly.

Re: Speed Test

#72
post #37

There'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.

I've been trouble shooting a dodgy 5G connection the last month or so and have entirely abandoned fast.com now. It seems susceptible to wildly inaccurate results when the connection is "bursty", the way 5G can be. I've got some very impressive screenshots from it though, next time anyone wants a measuring contest.

Re: Speed Test

#73

Smart. With a bit of SEO/marketing, this will become the way consumers judge their internet quality. If connection quality = ping to cloudflare then that puts cloudflare in a very strong negotiating position for peering agreements etc.

There are decent alternatives for this. Fast.com is hosted by Netflix, making them an excellent speedtest to check for service throttling. Google has a speedtest as well (Google "speed test" and it'll show a button). The more of these tests start appearing, the better.

> hosted by Netflix, making them an excellent speedtest to check for service throttling

That's exactly what the person above you meant about Cloudflare, right? By using the Netflix speedtest as a benchmark, you're promoting good connectivity to another commercial entity (for good or for bad, I don't mean to judge, just stating)

Re: Speed Test

#74
post #27

Uff. Apparently gives correct readings mostly in Chrome only. I have a 500/500M connection and on the same computer Chrome gives 465/364 and Firefox has 311/303M. EDIT: this was on Linux/intel. On Mac M1Pro it Chrome/FF/Safari all get pretty much the same numbers. Both computers have wired ethernet.

I don't have Chrome installed, but on Windows / AMD, I get roughly comparable numbers between Edge (340/211) and Firefox (341/253).

Re: Speed Test

#75

btw, on macOS, you can just enter `networkQuality` into your terminal for a speed test. No third-party website or tool of any kind needed, it's a built-in mac CLI.

Who's it measuring against? An (internet) speed test by its nature requires some remote third-party, if you aren't just testing to your own server

They seem to have edge servers around the world. Even here in South Africa, I got idle latency to be 27ms so it must be somewhere in the country. This is from running networkQuality on a MacBook Pro.

Re: Speed Test

#76

Smart. With a bit of SEO/marketing, this will become the way consumers judge their internet quality. If connection quality = ping to cloudflare then that puts cloudflare in a very strong negotiating position for peering agreements etc.

There are decent alternatives for this. Fast.com is hosted by Netflix, making them an excellent speedtest to check for service throttling. Google has a speedtest as well (Google "speed test" and it'll show a button). The more of these tests start appearing, the better.

I've found Fast.com gamed sometimes when traveling in Asia/Europe, in the sense the ISP prioritizes Netflix traffic but normal traffic never gets within 20% of that Fast.com download speed or has much higher latency or something...?

With Cloudflare I'm guessing it's a more balanced measure.

Re: Speed Test

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Googling says there's CityFibre and Giganet in the MK area. Did they skip your house? A fibre company skipped my street in London.
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