91–100 of 186 posts
That seems like a lot for name recognition. I bet you could rebuild their technology for like $20m at the most, and buy 100% market share for like $100m easy. Unless they have some other assets other than the obvious?
It takes more than money to supplant the name brand that every ISP games and every front line support worker uses by name
I would never have had SpeedTest on my board of unicorns…that’s an unbelievable sale price. To all the agents who negotiated that deal, my hat is off to you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All it takes to defeat the business model is https://openspeedtest.com/
That test was totally inaccurate for me. It got the download right but upload was only 1/12 of my rated speed and 1/12 of what all the other tests (and my actual experience) tell me.
I am not sure why this old news is surfacing here today but I can give my 2 cents, since I sold speedchecker.com last year and were directly competing with Ookla. The main business is selling the data. You use Speedtest.net to troubleshoot your connection but metrics captured with the test alongside location data give telcos invaluable insights on where they should improve their networks. Telcos pay 6 figures annuall…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I used a major cable ISP, often my connection seemed slow, so I'd go to speedtest.com. The speedtest would be fine... and then I would magically have faster network performance again. It happened enough times that I'm suspicious the ISP had some way to detect if you run a speedtest, and then prioritized traffic to that customer.
This was one of the reasons given, at the time, for why Netflix created fast.com. It's served by the same infra that does their streaming, and is thus difficult for isps to game. That is, it'd be hard for them to do some hack to make fast.com numbers without also benefiting Netflix streaming performance in the bargain.
That said, why didn't Netflix acquire the market leader in this space? Creating their own seems way less useful, since network effects are the whole point.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was one of the reasons given, at the time, for why Netflix created fast.com. It's served by the same infra that does their streaming, and is thus difficult for isps to game. That is, it'd be hard for them to do some hack to make fast.com numbers without also benefiting Netflix streaming performance in the bargain.
Actually I thought Netflix had already acquired Ookla / speedtest.com, so I was surprised to see this headline. But it looks like this was just the Mandela effect. That said, why didn't Netflix acquire the market leader in this space? Creating their own seems way less useful, since network effects are the whole point.
I am not sure why this old news is surfacing here today but I can give my 2 cents, since I sold speedchecker.com last year and were directly competing with Ookla. The main business is selling the data. You use Speedtest.net to troubleshoot your connection but metrics captured with the test alongside location data give telcos invaluable insights on where they should improve their networks. Telcos pay 6 figures annuall…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course they are not complex. They do have a network effect though. If you go to your local ISP and say “hey, my 500mbps plan is only doing 100mbps on Speedtest.net”, they’ll “fix it” (usually by working with Ookla to put an edge endpoint on their network) If you tell the “hey frankyspeeddetect.com isn’t doing my 500mbps” they’ll tell you to it’s an issue with that random website. ISPs and services reach out to Ook…
When I used a major cable ISP, often my connection seemed slow, so I'd go to speedtest.com. The speedtest would be fine... and then I would magically have faster network performance again. It happened enough times that I'm suspicious the ISP had some way to detect if you run a speedtest, and then prioritized traffic to that customer.
ISPs definitely know when you run a speedtest.net test. 90% of the time, the data for that comes from boxes/services they host themselves. It’s not exactly hidden either. It’s a typical program any ISP can sign up for and you can easily see the destination the test is running against. I won’t be surprised if some have some logic to prioritize particular subscribers plan once they have detected a test from them. They probably view it as a “customer support calls reduction” feature.