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Testing for speed is great and all but is there an app or something that can monitor my Mac's end-to-end connectivity to an internet source? Like, I feel like my connectivity is spotty but am not sure if it's Wifi, Comcast or other.
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.
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.
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 friction is.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Latency is largely irrelevant to one-way video streaming (at least until it's so high it affects throughput), and since Netflix designed this to test your speed for their one-way video streaming service I think leaving out latency testing is reasonable.
Latency is critically important... You can easily determine how much of a problem it is in your case by calculating your bandwidth delay product: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwidth-delay_product
For many activities on the internet a 1,000ms latency would be intolerable, but for one-way video streaming it's unnoticeable to the end user. I don't really care if a packet containing video takes 50ms or 1000ms to get from the CDN to my TV, as long as it gets there and is reasonably consistent in it's ability to do so.
For this use case, if my machine can get 20Mb/s on the test, latency will just not affect me streaming a 10Mb/s video. Latency may be lowering my test results, but that's the point here - testing the effective throughput.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Latency is largely irrelevant to one-way video streaming (at least until it's so high it affects throughput), and since Netflix designed this to test your speed for their one-way video streaming service I think leaving out latency testing is reasonable.
Latency is critically important... You can easily determine how much of a problem it is in your case by calculating your bandwidth delay product: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwidth-delay_product
I seem to be unable to view the blog post in Firefox, it automatically goes to https which doesn't load. Maybe netflix messed up their HSTS settings at some point in the past?
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.
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.
Makes sense but wouldn't they then use the netflix domain? Something like netflix.com/fast? I could image that if providers throttle it would be a mix of IPs and domain.
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.
Makes sense but wouldn't they then use the netflix domain? Something like netflix.com/fast? I could image that if providers throttle it would be a mix of IPs and domain.
The interesting traffic is not to fast.com.