I thought it was gonna be a public dashboard of transfer bandwidth globally in the cloudflare network, so domain could have been more descriptive. How about "speedtest.cloudflare.com"?
I'm seeing that my upload speed (90M) is way under both what is advertised, and what other speed tests show. Is there a good way to test what my actual upload speed is?
All of those tests show your actual upload speed. The whole concept of "upload speed" or "download speed" are incompletely defined questions. "Upload... to where?"
The number that your ISP gives you is likely what they provision for your connection between you and your ISP
The number that a speed test gives you is the measured bandwidth between you and the server on the other end. This is expected to be different for different routes across the internet.
If you want to test just the pipe between you and your ISP, many ISPs provide their own speed test servers for this purpose.
Something I find fascinating, over the last 5 years the main bottleneck on my internet connection has gone from the provider to my wifi, despite ~3 standard revisions in that time frame. It makes the notion of a wireless only provider somewhat appealing if they can manage similar speeds to wifi (within range of the 5G standard ).
This! You have to admire the engineering that turned a coax cable that could barely handle a few kbps in the early 2000s into something as fast as my LAN today.
Speaking of this, my mind is in a constant battle between "ISPs like Comcast do nothing to improve the infrastructure they monopolize" and "ISPs like Comcast are doing amazing things like converting an old cable line into a 200mbps downlink and handling 'quarantine-level' network usage with ease".
Somehow I think both are true, I'm just not sure how it's possible...
It used to be my coax node was shared by over 200 people, and that was 1 TV channel equivalent of data. Then DOCSIS 2.0 came out and those 200 people were split between roughly 7 TV channels worth of data. This is how you'd get the standard 6-26 mbps home internet.
Then Google Fiber came out and ISPs started running fiber to the streets of most houses, but not running fiber directly to each house. This was in defense of Google Fiber, so they could switch people to fiber gigabit easily with little transition. Now there is DOCSIS 3.0 which does channel bonding, so a single person can have up to the equivalent of 32 TV channels of data, getting up to 1.2 gbps if unshared. Today, the average home shares their bandwidth with between 0 and 3 other houses. The fiber is right outside. If you order gigabit cable internet they will run the fiber to your front yard but not let you connect to it directly.
On comcast the lowest speed you can order where you get fiber internet is 2gbps, and because DOCSIS 3.1 now allows 10+ gbps cable internet, Comcast fiber may become a thing of the past. In a way, DOCSIS 3 has been a set back for consumers. Sure you can get multi 100mbps even gbps internet, but it allows cable companies to not have to run fiber that last 30 feet.
With fiber your ping time is lower, so your internet feels quite a bit faster. Fast internet today isn't mbps, it's ping time.
> With fiber your ping time is lower, so your internet feels quite a bit faster. Fast internet today isn't mbps, it's ping time.
Two thoughts about this:
1. On 100/10 coax, ping times to 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8, and 9.9.9.9 are all under 20 msec. What could a lower last mile latency possibly get me? Even cutting it to zero would seemingly not make a noticeable difference for page load times and the like.
2. I really wish this speed test measured your real latency, but it does not. It tests for latency pre-load, not during the load. Because of bufferbloat, most users will find that when they're downloading a file (whether that's someone on Netflix, or fetching a 2 MB image for a news article) their latency goes up dramatically, possibly hitting in the hundreds of msecs. It's really regrettable that this test doesn't try to measure this in any way. Fast.com does, but it's the only free test I can find that does.
After a lot of tinkering, I managed to get my latency under load down to 50 msecs without a significant drop to my maximum speeds, but this required quite a lot of tinkering with queue management on a BSD based router, and I suspect most people will see worse results.
> Comcast isn't building new last mile infrastructure, they're using new modems on both ends of the coax cable.
In a lot of places, they're also adding lots of equipment in the last mile to shrink the "node" sizes so that the number of households within any particular shared medium on Comcast is much smaller today than it was 10 years ago. It's not the same level of build out as bringing fiber drops to every home, but it's also not nothing.
Multi Tbps internet is available to certain academic institutions, how much did it cost in the early 2000s? And was it really meant for a single home use?
My computer in 2000 could not handle a 100 Mbps connection, and only had 32 MB of ram as I recall. The 100 Mbps may have been targeted towards businesses operating servers in a home address that were and are relatively common in the bay.
It isn't as fast as your LAN. It's shared between dozens (hundreds?) of flats, the upload bandwidth is very low, latency is relatively high and security can be questionable if encryption is not enabled due to the shared nature of it.
Yes. Personally I am not at all happy with the direction WiFi is going. 802.11ax still sucks, compared to something like 4G LTE E-UTRA. Unfortunately MultiFire never took off.
And we are stuck with Gigabit Ethernet still. I know 10Gbps is too much to ask, but how about 5Gbps?
You can get 10Gig ethernet cards for ~$120 and a 10Gig switch for ~$250. To me that seems like a reasonable price for anyone doing work that needs that kind of bandwidth.
This feels to me that its due more to a lack of demand. Ever since I got off Comcast 10Mbps down/1 up in 2009 and went to Fios, which IIRC was offering 35/10 at the time, I haven't don't think I have ever felt that network speeds have been a problem. I occasionally do large file transfers, but its usually the SD card or hard drives that are more speed constrained than the network itself.
You can get faster stuff, but its all business level and it gets very expensive quickly. Until 8k video becomes a real thing (and thus far, 4k video isn't even much of a thing), I don't see any real need for faster network speeds. Do you?
I agree for most of our usage we dont need it. But it is often the peak that a system is designed for. And while my NAS cant bump out 1GB/s just yet. It could easy do 200 - 500MB/s.
And I often dont like the idea running into limits with Gigabits Ethernet, which is fine on itself. I just prefer to have headrooms.
For wireless that is entirely different. WiFi, even 802.11ax just aren't suited for multiple user with constant connection. People now prefer to use 4G / LTE for their speed and reliability. And that is why I would have liked to see LTE on Un-Licensed spectrum.
Why is 10 Gbps too much to ask? You can purchase 10 Gbps NICs and switches now. Works fine over cat6 which has been around for two decades, or the slightly newer cat6a if the building you own is measured in acres.
Yes, the switches and NICs cost more than 1 Gbps gear, but that was also true of 1 Gbps when 100 Mbps was the norm.
And if reusing existing cabling is not a constraint, used fiber+SFP switches on eBay are well within the reach of a hobbyist.
the faq on the cloudflare website answers that: they dont publish datacenter locations for security reasons so mostly show the nearest airports on maps
net7-client[0] is the reference implementation for doing speed tests with Measurement Lab, which is also behind the speed test widget in Google search results for the "speed test" query.
SpeedTest[1] is an alternative to speedtest-cli for the Ookla speed test, written in C++.
Cloudflare: 455 Mbps down / 73.1 Mbps up / Latency 13.0 ms / Jitter 2.26 ms / Server: Ashburn via IPv6.
Netflix (fast.com): 790 Mbps down / 950 Mbps up / Latency 8 ms unloaded, 12 ms loaded / Server: Ashburn via IPv6.
Ookla (speedtest.net): 928 Mbps down / 938 Mbps up / Ping 1 ms / Server: Raleigh via IPv4.
DSL Reports (http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest): 611 Mbps down / 929 Mbps up / ping 16-41ms / Servers: Houston, Dallas, Newcastle DE, Nashville TN, Dallas.
Location: Raleigh. Provider: AT&T fiber.
Test run using Safari, macOS 10.15.4, Thunderbolt Ethernet.
Edit: the small file sizes used for some of the tests seem to drag down the overall speed measurement quite a bit. It's biased against upload measurements too since there's download files sizes of 25MB and 100MB whereas upload tests only up to 10MB file size. But even there, something seems off. The upload measurements are much smaller for the same file sizes (e.g. 170 Mbps avg vs 7 Mbs average for a 10 kB file).
I question this methodology. I care most about my 1Gps when I'm downloading the latest version of Xcode or some other huge file. I guess the smaller sizes are to better emulate downloading web pages, but in that case, the latency is probably what matters more. Even with 1Gps, when I'm out in CA, sites typically feel faster.
Edit 2:
speedtest.googlefiber.net: 800-900 Mbps down / 800-900 Mbps up (multiple tests to servers in Charlotte, Raleigh, Atlanta, seems to bounce around each time I reload the page).
Speedtest (Ookla) with server manually set to Windstream in Ashburn, VA: 886 Mbps down, 900 Mbps up. Confirmed that my router is measuring the same amount, so Ookla isn't just making up these numbers.
I also have synchronous gigabit fiber, and I was surprised to get way different results from the others. They're similar to yours. Not sure if this is on CloudFlare's end, or if there's something on my end or my ISP's end.
Don't think you can compare those two, as they are different things. Even if Cloudflare "relies more on their own infrastructure", they still have to have peering agreements with others, otherwise they can't accept/send traffic.
More likely, Netflix has better infrastructure and better peering agreements, than Cloudflare. Which is kind of surprising, since Netflix is supposedly a media company and Cloudflare is a "internet" company.
Netflix has an advantage: their OCA boxes may handle speed test traffic [1]. That means a box racked at your ISP[2] may be serving that traffic. While Cloudflare may have nice peering agreements, they don't have that.
How does that explain me getting solid results from DSL Reports, Ookla to a random server I picked in Ashburn, and to Google Fiber's servers in Atlanta, Charlotte, and locally.
I think there's something about the methodology of Cloudflare's test.
My point is limited to "fast.com could give faster results because you may not even leave your ISP to talk to them"; I'm not here to say "Cloudflare's results are good/bad/better/worse/reliable/unreliable."
A thought, though: Cloudflare reports your p90 time as "your speed". I don't know what the other sites report. Is it the same?
That makes sense, think there been evidence of ISPs throttling connections, except for speedtests, in the past, so would make sense. My own ISP also used to throttle Steam downloads for a couple of years, until suddenly they didn't.
I thought one of the goals of fast.com was to let users find out if their ISP is throttling Netflix. ISPs can't only throttle a speedtest if Netflix makes it indistinguishable.
Maybe that is, but one can think of a number of ways for ISPs to work around that. Quick thought: if the ISP is also your DNS resolver (which is the default for most people), check if there been a query for fast.com and if so, stop the throttling for five minutes. After those minutes, start throttling again.
Not so, Viasat will throttle based on headers and even built helpers for speed tests that bypass other limits. Such as forced video resolution down grades.
Even the max rates reported under "Download Measurements" and "Upload Measurements" are slower than any other site I test against. The site also has a lot more variability from test to test.
I get download measurements anywhere from 400-800 Mbps, but mostly under 500 Mbps. I have yet to see an upload measurement above 100 Mbps.
This test just doesn't reflect real-world results for my Internet connection.
Not to discount anything you've said, but some speed tests I've run find a server that is so close to me that it's not really testing 'Internet speed' as it is just the speed of my ISP and maybe another. I don't know what people want from speed tests and it's good to have different ones, just know what you're measuring.
I'm not a low-latency gamer so none of the differences really matter unless they're near zero. I've been streaming video and fetching/pushing git repos that I use since having a 5Mbps connection.
For me I get roughly the same download speed as the normal measurements (875Mbps), but upload is more than halved (423Mbps) compared to what other tests report (tests that I have more faith in, like bredbandskollen.se which is reputed to be very good for Swedish connections).
Note: ISPs provide speedtest.net servers themselves, so that never leaves the ISP and only tests the link to them.
fast.com likely has the exact same issue, as Netflix has content boxes at ISPs, although I can't say for sure.
Plus, even then, "speed" isn't absolute. It's all about agreements, routes, capacities and load. Test to specific targets of interest if you can, e.g. http://speedtest-nyc1.digitalocean.com/.
It depends what you want to measure of course. I provided results to a variety of servers besides my local fast.com and speedtest.net server. As well, I'm familiar with what speeds I get when downloading Xcode, when pulling binaries via Usenet, etc. The results from Cloudflare indicate to me a bottleneck on their end, and something is especially wonky with the upload result.
I get 860-910 Mbps down/ 180-372 Mbps up to NYC[1-3], TOR1, but I have to test using Chrome. Running the DO test under Safari is pegging the CPU on a Macbook Pro 2.7 Ghz i7. (The other speed tests run fine under Safari.)
Indeed, their tests are currently wonky. I get 10% of my regular upload capacity, and 30-50% of my download through their test, despite testing to a Cloudflare location within the same city as myself.
I just wanted to ensure that we correctly discredited useless numbers and focused on the interesting ones instead.
Thanks for the feedback, very much appreciated! I'm a product manager here at Cloudflare, responsible for launching this tool. Since the launch, we've found some issues that we're going to address:
- Especially for users with a very fast Internet connection, speed.cloudflare.com reports upload speeds much lower than expected figures. We don't yet know what is causing this but will disable the upload part of the test until we know more.
- In general reported download speeds are little lower than figures coming from other speed tests. We will revisit our methodology to understand the discrepancy.
- Re: the speed test automatically starting: we appreciate the feedback and understand why some users may not want this as default behavior. We will disable the auto-start for now.
In the meantime, we appreciate any and all feedback, please keep it coming: you can reach me at achiel [at] cloudflare.com
For Bitcoin, we run a open source relay network called FIBRE, and incredibly low latency network which uses some encoding tricks to gain significantly faster than TCP transmission of block data around the world. It's currently limited in part by the number of points of presence that can be reasonably operated from. Is there anybody at Cloudflare that would be interested in taking this on using your incredibly latency-diverse network?
> - In general reported download speeds are little lower than figures coming from other speed tests. We will revisit our methodology to understand the discrepancy.
For what it's worth, Cloudflare shows me at 10mbps down, and Speedtest shows me at 160mbps (much closer to my expected 200mbps). This is a large difference.
speedtest.net (and I expect quite a few other speed tests) will open many connections to overcome slowness caused by TCP (low max window sizes and slow scaling). This is likely where the download discrepancy is coming from.
Personally I prefer the single TCP connection results as these tell me what I'm likely to see in a real-world situation such as web browsing with HTTP/2 or a large download.
I'm also getting 10 - 43mbps and 75ms+ ping w/ 60ms jitter on speed.Cloudflare (vs 550mbps and <10ms on fast.com).
I've confirmed the 500mbps speed I pay for in Montreal is accurate with my own iperf and iperf3 tests to physical servers I own in NYC, so it's not a "your ISP is colluding with the speedtest sites" thing. I've also confirmed I have a 1ms rtt to 8.8.8.8, and a 10ms rtt to 1.1.1.1 with ~2ms jitter by pinging them in terminal.
These CF test results worry me somewhat because I host a bunch of traffic on servers in my closet over Cloudflare Argo tunnels, does this mean those services are only able to push ~45mbps with 60ms ping via Cloudflare? Or is this just an artifact of something weird going on with the test methodology?
Interestingly, for me, it's reporting significantly higher speeds than I'm paying for, and than other speed tests report.
I'm paying for 100 Mbps down / 100 Mbps up, and every speedtest always comes very close. Upload usually a little higher. From experience the actual maximum speed is also roughly 12 to 13 MBps.
Cloudflare is reporting 667 Mbps down / 220 Mbps up.
It depends how it's tested. Clearly short burst test produces high numbers, because it gets really high, before traffic shaping (throttling) kicks in. In my case cloudflare reports almost 10x the speed I'm actually getting for prolonged downloads. Of course burst speed is much higher.
You might know this but in case others don't, seeing different speed test results to different services/servers is completely normal.
A lot of people forget or don't understand the "net" part of "internet". The internet isn't a monolithic service you connect to. When your ISP offers you "1Gbps" internet, they're not guaranteeing that whatever your activity, you will get 1Gbps, they're just giving you a 1Gbps connection to their network.
Their network will then interconnect with other networks. Depending on the specifics of those interconnections, you will see different performance characteristics depending on what you're doing.
For example my ISP peers with a particular network that hosts servers ~600km away that I exchange a ton of data with. I get 1Gbps when I use my ISP. However when I use a different local ISP that doesn't peer with the remote network, I see significantly reduced speeds, because the route taken to exchange data isn't optimal.
I know the HN crowd is fairly technically competent but I've seen plenty of competent people who I think knew this in an abstract sense but it just hadn't clicked for them what the practical consequences were.
Luxury! 33.4 Mbps down 22.5 ms latency 8.5 ms jitter in a medium city in Tennessee, USA. Paying for up to 100 Mbps, but ~35 is consistent across times and sites.
Follow-up: 33.4 was because I'm an idiot. I have a surge suppressor with coax in/out between the wall and my modem (lost a cable modem, router and networked laser printer to lightning a few years ago). Removing it puts me at 103/23.0/4.53. I'm sure I checked after adding the surge suppressor, but not, apparently, in quite a long time.
Metropolitan Sydney (upload is temporarily disabled)
Paying A$89 for TPG 100Mbps plan
Server location: Sydney
Down 93.6Mbps
Latency: 14.9ms
Jitter: 4.97ms
Before students went back to school, upload bandwidth was throttled at 4~8Mbps (due to the congestion caused by nation wide WFH), now speedtest / fast.com reports 30~40Mbps...
Surprisingly, download bandwidth has not been affected like Optus Cable before (experienced 10Mbps or less for 100Mbps/2Mbps plan), facepalm.
I strongly prefer google's speedtest[0] as it's run through M-Labs (Measurement Labs). This group originally gained prominence doing distributed testing of ISP's to determine if they were blocking specific types of traffic (torrents, etc) I think 15 years ago or so.
M-Labs for me has the highest real-world accuracy, because it's designed to obfuscate the testing servers so that your ISP can't cheat or make itself look better by prioritizing M-Labs servers.
On ethernet always get close to 1Gbps on Fast.com by CF shows consistently around 300-400. Wonder if CF is more accurate or Fast.com? I'm imagining CF but such a difference.
Fast.com specifically measures your speed to a Netflix mirror, vs CloudFlare measuring your speed to a CloudFlare data center. Netflix probably has a box in your ISPs data center/head end that is closer to you (unless you live in a town with a CloudFlare data center, in which case the difference shouldn't be this drastic).
CF's score is probably more relevant since there's a lot more sites that are hosted there than netflix (which is just netflix).
Having built a few CDNs, I can tell you geographic proximity isn't a good metric for which POP is "best".
You might be located in Delhi, but maybe your ISP backhauls all your traffic to their head office in Mumbai for example. It wouldn't make sense to then ship your traffic back to Delhi just to serve it from the geographically closest location when Mumbai is your "network closest."
The Delhi POP might also be overloaded, or down for router maintenance, or they can serve your traffic cheaper from Mumbai.
Interesting... I got a result of 44Mb/s down, which is 8 more than I pay for and 13 more than any other speed test shows (i.e. speedtest.net, fast.com, BT Wholesale speed check).
How precisely did they pinpoint you on the map? 100m/300ft here in a chromium derivative i reserve for stuff like that.
/me feels im/depressed.
edit: Latency varies but goes down to 6 to 5.5ms, similar for jitter, but even lower to just above 4ms. Line almost maxed out. Just missing 5up/2down. On really ancient HW :-)
Your IP address (which is "owned" by your ISP) has a location assigned to it, usually the closest "router" run by your ISP. Depends on how your internet infrastructure looks where you live, but where I live, the map is off by ~3.56 km (~2.21 mi).
All of these are on a Dell using a USB3 Ethernet adapter. The only thing that I currently have running gigabit not through an adapter is my AppleTV4 running the speedtest app.
On the online gaming end of things it can be much more important than other metrics, depending on the genre. But there is an unfortunate amount of misconceptions floating around out there, and people tend to default to "higher speed = better" speed test results, when bandwidth doesn't really matter beyond a certain baseline.
Something seems severely wrong, either on Cloudflare's side, or on the way to the cloudflare edge that the test is measuring against. It's a shame as the UI gives you lots of information on just one page, especially like the jitter measurement which most speedtests don't seem to do anymore.
Doesn't work for me either, but not getting any errors logged on the console.
It just blinks "Running..." for 2 seconds, zooms in the map and goes into "Paused" state without any other changes to the page. There's a stream of smaller GET requests towards speed.cloudflare.com/__down, all resulting in 200.
I am on the fence about the consent thing. Yes, it's a speed test, but no, you don't really necessarily know that when it gets linked on some site. Burning through quite a bit of potentially metered data without asking first seems... rude, at the very least.
For your third point - the map, all the rendering and javascript overhead screw with the results, especially on weaker hardware, not to mention how loaded the server is and all the links on the way to the server.
Just ran the test on another machine (different hardware, OS, browser) and got pretty different result. Also uncovered a bug, on my 100 mbit ethernet they show almost 200 mbit upload speed.
From their FAQ:
"Why build another speed test tool?
There are many speed test tools out there. Our mission is to help build a better Internet. To do so, we believe in giving users a choice of different services: you shouldn’t be tied to one provider and you should be able to compare results across different tools."
This tool would be more useful when it allows people to "compare" their speed with others.
Average speed in their country
One network with another in the same country
Compare a country's average speed with another
Rank...
Add the benchmarks and put a share to social media button and HOPEFULLY.
Are you on IPv6 by any chance? I got the same thing, despite being in SoCal. I saw that the site was showing my IPv6 address, so I checked a couple of location databases and I'm getting results that are way off. A couple say New Jersey, one says "North America" and leaves it at that. I think that might match whatever Cloudflare is using since the dot is just in the middle of the US, i.e. Kansas.
Regardless, it's showing me as connecting to the LA server, which is almost undoubtedly the clostest PoP, so I'm not too concerned.
Love how Cloudflare keep coming out with all these new tools, 1.1.1.1 DNS, then VPN, isbgpsafeyet.com now this. The CEO is awesome too, and often hangs around HN.
I seem to be getting pretty accurate results unlike others here, not sure if it's been fixed or my peerings are better:
Tests (Download):
Cloudflare: 78, 73, 73, 73
Netflix: 74, 78, 71, 69
Google: 70, 70, 70, 65
Speedtest.net: 68, 67, 70, 71
I know this doesn't mean too much alone, but for me seemed to produce on average the highest speed.
Seems to be degrading since I first tried one hour ago, so nothing been fixed. Most likely the edge servers are not as great as they are made out to be, so we're seeing wildly different results depending on the location/edge server you're connected to.
> There are many speed test tools out there. Our mission is to help build a better Internet. To do so, we believe in giving users a choice of different services: you shouldn’t be tied to one provider and you should be able to compare results across different tools.
Under "About" section. That's a really weak argument to invent a new tool.
That's actually a really strong argument to invent a new tool, especially for speed tests. Each provider can never paint a full picture on their own, so having multiple things to test against is useful.
You can make that argument literally for everything and anything.
Why need a new programming language? Well, because we think that our users deserve more choices.
That does not fly well when someone needs to fork out $$$ to fund the activity.
Back to the topic, what users really need is a way to run all available tools (there are many speed test tools out there) and provide them a "full picture" in one shot. Sure, the test will take 3 mins to run but it would more useful if you're concerned about usefulness.
Indeed, you can make that argument for everything, and it still holds. You want more competition, not less.
From a speed-test service, difference is indeed in who you test against: Location is a feature. No different than programming languages providing different features.
Without this service, you would not be able to speedtest towards cloudflare infrastructure at all. You'd need this at the very least to try to create the "monster" test-suite you suggest.
However, it is entirely impossible to provide "a full picture", simply because there is no such thing. In a given moment, there is a given possible throughput and latency for any given point A to point B, which holds no value for any other point, or any other time.
Cloudflare seems to consistently report higher than cap speeds due to 100k and 1mb files not engaging the traffic shaper, while the 10MB files seems to be in line with the other speed tests which they seem to do a continuous download.
Seeing modern internet speeds still puts a grin on my face. It's so fast. I really should not be getting >100 Mbps sustained to a regional server and 50 Mbps across an ocean -- those will always be local area speeds in my mind.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 212 ms ] threadThe name is fairly descriptive; it does what's advertised without any subterfuge. And there's a Pause button.
This isn't bad behaviour, people just may not expect it based on what they are used to.
If I had I would have probably brought at least one video conference to a halt.
I have fios 1Gb service. From clouldflare I see ~500Mb/s down and 90Mb/s up, and fast.com shows 600Mb/s down and 900Mb/s up.
The number that your ISP gives you is likely what they provision for your connection between you and your ISP
The number that a speed test gives you is the measured bandwidth between you and the server on the other end. This is expected to be different for different routes across the internet.
If you want to test just the pipe between you and your ISP, many ISPs provide their own speed test servers for this purpose.
examples:
https://speedtest.xfinity.com
https://www.verizon.com/speedtest/
Yes, use iperf or netperf instead.
It only shows a download test for me...
Somehow I think both are true, I'm just not sure how it's possible...
Then Google Fiber came out and ISPs started running fiber to the streets of most houses, but not running fiber directly to each house. This was in defense of Google Fiber, so they could switch people to fiber gigabit easily with little transition. Now there is DOCSIS 3.0 which does channel bonding, so a single person can have up to the equivalent of 32 TV channels of data, getting up to 1.2 gbps if unshared. Today, the average home shares their bandwidth with between 0 and 3 other houses. The fiber is right outside. If you order gigabit cable internet they will run the fiber to your front yard but not let you connect to it directly.
On comcast the lowest speed you can order where you get fiber internet is 2gbps, and because DOCSIS 3.1 now allows 10+ gbps cable internet, Comcast fiber may become a thing of the past. In a way, DOCSIS 3 has been a set back for consumers. Sure you can get multi 100mbps even gbps internet, but it allows cable companies to not have to run fiber that last 30 feet.
With fiber your ping time is lower, so your internet feels quite a bit faster. Fast internet today isn't mbps, it's ping time.
Two thoughts about this:
1. On 100/10 coax, ping times to 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8, and 9.9.9.9 are all under 20 msec. What could a lower last mile latency possibly get me? Even cutting it to zero would seemingly not make a noticeable difference for page load times and the like.
2. I really wish this speed test measured your real latency, but it does not. It tests for latency pre-load, not during the load. Because of bufferbloat, most users will find that when they're downloading a file (whether that's someone on Netflix, or fetching a 2 MB image for a news article) their latency goes up dramatically, possibly hitting in the hundreds of msecs. It's really regrettable that this test doesn't try to measure this in any way. Fast.com does, but it's the only free test I can find that does.
After a lot of tinkering, I managed to get my latency under load down to 50 msecs without a significant drop to my maximum speeds, but this required quite a lot of tinkering with queue management on a BSD based router, and I suspect most people will see worse results.
On fiber when I'm downloading at the full 126 MB/s my ping barely goes up, unlike on cable.
They are running fiber lines although to be able to serve the the increased bandwidth demands.
In a lot of places, they're also adding lots of equipment in the last mile to shrink the "node" sizes so that the number of households within any particular shared medium on Comcast is much smaller today than it was 10 years ago. It's not the same level of build out as bringing fiber drops to every home, but it's also not nothing.
My computer in 2000 could not handle a 100 Mbps connection, and only had 32 MB of ram as I recall. The 100 Mbps may have been targeted towards businesses operating servers in a home address that were and are relatively common in the bay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/@Home_Network
And we are stuck with Gigabit Ethernet still. I know 10Gbps is too much to ask, but how about 5Gbps?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2.5GBASE-T_and_5GBASE-T
It is still not very common. The main use case for it is backhaul for access points in commercial settings.
You can get faster stuff, but its all business level and it gets very expensive quickly. Until 8k video becomes a real thing (and thus far, 4k video isn't even much of a thing), I don't see any real need for faster network speeds. Do you?
And I often dont like the idea running into limits with Gigabits Ethernet, which is fine on itself. I just prefer to have headrooms.
For wireless that is entirely different. WiFi, even 802.11ax just aren't suited for multiple user with constant connection. People now prefer to use 4G / LTE for their speed and reliability. And that is why I would have liked to see LTE on Un-Licensed spectrum.
Yes, the switches and NICs cost more than 1 Gbps gear, but that was also true of 1 Gbps when 100 Mbps was the norm.
And if reusing existing cabling is not a constraint, used fiber+SFP switches on eBay are well within the reach of a hobbyist.
I wondered why map markers were always airports:
> Data center locations are tracked as airport codes and may not be 100% accurate.
SpeedTest[1] is an alternative to speedtest-cli for the Ookla speed test, written in C++.
[0]: https://github.com/m-lab/ndt7-client-go
[1]: https://github.com/taganaka/SpeedTest
Netflix (fast.com): 790 Mbps down / 950 Mbps up / Latency 8 ms unloaded, 12 ms loaded / Server: Ashburn via IPv6.
Ookla (speedtest.net): 928 Mbps down / 938 Mbps up / Ping 1 ms / Server: Raleigh via IPv4.
DSL Reports (http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest): 611 Mbps down / 929 Mbps up / ping 16-41ms / Servers: Houston, Dallas, Newcastle DE, Nashville TN, Dallas.
Location: Raleigh. Provider: AT&T fiber.
Test run using Safari, macOS 10.15.4, Thunderbolt Ethernet.
Edit: the small file sizes used for some of the tests seem to drag down the overall speed measurement quite a bit. It's biased against upload measurements too since there's download files sizes of 25MB and 100MB whereas upload tests only up to 10MB file size. But even there, something seems off. The upload measurements are much smaller for the same file sizes (e.g. 170 Mbps avg vs 7 Mbs average for a 10 kB file).
I question this methodology. I care most about my 1Gps when I'm downloading the latest version of Xcode or some other huge file. I guess the smaller sizes are to better emulate downloading web pages, but in that case, the latency is probably what matters more. Even with 1Gps, when I'm out in CA, sites typically feel faster.
Edit 2:
speedtest.googlefiber.net: 800-900 Mbps down / 800-900 Mbps up (multiple tests to servers in Charlotte, Raleigh, Atlanta, seems to bounce around each time I reload the page).
Speedtest (Ookla) with server manually set to Windstream in Ashburn, VA: 886 Mbps down, 900 Mbps up. Confirmed that my router is measuring the same amount, so Ookla isn't just making up these numbers.
More likely, Netflix has better infrastructure and better peering agreements, than Cloudflare. Which is kind of surprising, since Netflix is supposedly a media company and Cloudflare is a "internet" company.
[1]: https://netflixtechblog.com/building-fast-com-4857fe0f8adb
[2]: https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/#what-is-open-connect
I think there's something about the methodology of Cloudflare's test.
A thought, though: Cloudflare reports your p90 time as "your speed". I don't know what the other sites report. Is it the same?
I get download measurements anywhere from 400-800 Mbps, but mostly under 500 Mbps. I have yet to see an upload measurement above 100 Mbps.
This test just doesn't reflect real-world results for my Internet connection.
I'm not a low-latency gamer so none of the differences really matter unless they're near zero. I've been streaming video and fetching/pushing git repos that I use since having a 5Mbps connection.
fast.com likely has the exact same issue, as Netflix has content boxes at ISPs, although I can't say for sure.
Plus, even then, "speed" isn't absolute. It's all about agreements, routes, capacities and load. Test to specific targets of interest if you can, e.g. http://speedtest-nyc1.digitalocean.com/.
I get 860-910 Mbps down/ 180-372 Mbps up to NYC[1-3], TOR1, but I have to test using Chrome. Running the DO test under Safari is pegging the CPU on a Macbook Pro 2.7 Ghz i7. (The other speed tests run fine under Safari.)
I just wanted to ensure that we correctly discredited useless numbers and focused on the interesting ones instead.
- Especially for users with a very fast Internet connection, speed.cloudflare.com reports upload speeds much lower than expected figures. We don't yet know what is causing this but will disable the upload part of the test until we know more.
- In general reported download speeds are little lower than figures coming from other speed tests. We will revisit our methodology to understand the discrepancy.
- Re: the speed test automatically starting: we appreciate the feedback and understand why some users may not want this as default behavior. We will disable the auto-start for now.
In the meantime, we appreciate any and all feedback, please keep it coming: you can reach me at achiel [at] cloudflare.com
For what it's worth, Cloudflare shows me at 10mbps down, and Speedtest shows me at 160mbps (much closer to my expected 200mbps). This is a large difference.
Personally I prefer the single TCP connection results as these tell me what I'm likely to see in a real-world situation such as web browsing with HTTP/2 or a large download.
I've confirmed the 500mbps speed I pay for in Montreal is accurate with my own iperf and iperf3 tests to physical servers I own in NYC, so it's not a "your ISP is colluding with the speedtest sites" thing. I've also confirmed I have a 1ms rtt to 8.8.8.8, and a 10ms rtt to 1.1.1.1 with ~2ms jitter by pinging them in terminal.
These CF test results worry me somewhat because I host a bunch of traffic on servers in my closet over Cloudflare Argo tunnels, does this mean those services are only able to push ~45mbps with 60ms ping via Cloudflare? Or is this just an artifact of something weird going on with the test methodology?
I'm paying for 100 Mbps down / 100 Mbps up, and every speedtest always comes very close. Upload usually a little higher. From experience the actual maximum speed is also roughly 12 to 13 MBps.
Cloudflare is reporting 667 Mbps down / 220 Mbps up.
Ookla also is generally run out of the isp datacenter.
Cloudflare has servers running at a PoP and doesn’t get the same performance
A lot of people forget or don't understand the "net" part of "internet". The internet isn't a monolithic service you connect to. When your ISP offers you "1Gbps" internet, they're not guaranteeing that whatever your activity, you will get 1Gbps, they're just giving you a 1Gbps connection to their network.
Their network will then interconnect with other networks. Depending on the specifics of those interconnections, you will see different performance characteristics depending on what you're doing.
For example my ISP peers with a particular network that hosts servers ~600km away that I exchange a ton of data with. I get 1Gbps when I use my ISP. However when I use a different local ISP that doesn't peer with the remote network, I see significantly reduced speeds, because the route taken to exchange data isn't optimal.
I know the HN crowd is fairly technically competent but I've seen plenty of competent people who I think knew this in an abstract sense but it just hadn't clicked for them what the practical consequences were.
44 Mbps down 30ms latency 12.5 ms jitter
What’s it like having internet that actually goes?
26.9 Mbps down 11.4ms latency 1.96ms jitter
What’s it like having internet that actually goes?
(my synch speed is only 24.73 Mbps, so those numbers dont seem right...)
-- Tony Abbott, probably.
Paying A$89 for TPG 100Mbps plan
Server location: Sydney Down 93.6Mbps Latency: 14.9ms Jitter: 4.97ms
Before students went back to school, upload bandwidth was throttled at 4~8Mbps (due to the congestion caused by nation wide WFH), now speedtest / fast.com reports 30~40Mbps...
Surprisingly, download bandwidth has not been affected like Optus Cable before (experienced 10Mbps or less for 100Mbps/2Mbps plan), facepalm.
M-Labs for me has the highest real-world accuracy, because it's designed to obfuscate the testing servers so that your ISP can't cheat or make itself look better by prioritizing M-Labs servers.
0: https://www.google.com/search?q=speedtest
Kept getting the test paused automatically on Firefox Dev Edition. Looking at the console:
CF's score is probably more relevant since there's a lot more sites that are hosted there than netflix (which is just netflix).
You might be located in Delhi, but maybe your ISP backhauls all your traffic to their head office in Mumbai for example. It wouldn't make sense to then ship your traffic back to Delhi just to serve it from the geographically closest location when Mumbai is your "network closest."
The Delhi POP might also be overloaded, or down for router maintenance, or they can serve your traffic cheaper from Mumbai.
/me feels im/depressed.
edit: Latency varies but goes down to 6 to 5.5ms, similar for jitter, but even lower to just above 4ms. Line almost maxed out. Just missing 5up/2down. On really ancient HW :-)
They appear to be putting me exactly where MaxMind's GeoIP database thinks I am.
Netflix - 700/280
DslReports - 400/638
Speedtest (Okla) - 602/621
All of these are on a Dell using a USB3 Ethernet adapter. The only thing that I currently have running gigabit not through an adapter is my AppleTV4 running the speedtest app.
AppleTV 4/SpeedTest (Okla) - 925/751
On the online gaming end of things it can be much more important than other metrics, depending on the genre. But there is an unfortunate amount of misconceptions floating around out there, and people tend to default to "higher speed = better" speed test results, when bandwidth doesn't really matter beyond a certain baseline.
In my region it seems only Azure manages to pump full gigabit up and down.
speed.cloudflare.com: 57.7Mbps (Server location: Madrid)
Fast.com: 320Mbps
Speedtest.net: 528.39Mpbs
Error fetching https://speed.cloudflare.com/__down?measId=4466372954803167&...: TypeError: i is undefined
Then it pauses itself. When I resume it, it runs for a few seconds (printing more errors) and pauses again.
I am using Firefox 76.0.1 on Fedora 32 x86_64. None of the adblocker addons I'm using are blocking anything.
Edit: For the reference, I believe that the default should be at least as locked down as my thing (all third-party cookies blocked and so on).
It just blinks "Running..." for 2 seconds, zooms in the map and goes into "Paused" state without any other changes to the page. There's a stream of smaller GET requests towards speed.cloudflare.com/__down, all resulting in 200.
Netflix: ▼ 890 Mbps ▲ 160 Mbps Payload 720Mb Latency 13ms
Netflix Open Connect is inside my ISP network
And still a latency of 13ms? Here, Cloudflare, Netflix, Google, and Ookla Speedtest all have latencies of 4-6ms.
- It starts as soon as you visit, other speed tests don't, which violates a user's consent.
- It collects and saves your data, also without asking.
- It gives wildly different results than other speedtests, with no explanation as to why.
Of course CloudFlare would screw up a speedtest. They screw up at everything else they do, so I'm 100% not surprised.
1) fast.com, 2) this feels like a reach, isn't "going to a speed test site" a pretty clear indicator of what the user intends to do?
> It gives wildly different results than other speedtests, with no explanation as to why.
I'm confused what your platonic ideal of a speed test is. Off the top of my head, I may care about:
* "speed to my ISP"
* "speed to something I care about that's 'nearby'" (fast.com to a Netflix box peered close to me)
* "speed to a CDN" (speed.cloudflare.com)
* "speed to a random data center somewhere" (speedof.me and friends)
* "speed to a box I own"
I'd be amazed if I didn't see significant deviation between all of those measures.
Trust me, if you have a gigabit fiber connection like mine, you would notice that their results are way, way off the mark. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23314368
There are many speed test tools out there. Our mission is to help build a better Internet. To do so, we believe in giving users a choice of different services: you shouldn’t be tied to one provider and you should be able to compare results across different tools."
This tool would be more useful when it allows people to "compare" their speed with others.
Average speed in their country One network with another in the same country Compare a country's average speed with another Rank...
Add the benchmarks and put a share to social media button and HOPEFULLY.
One other thing - add (Megabytes per second)
Regardless, it's showing me as connecting to the LA server, which is almost undoubtedly the clostest PoP, so I'm not too concerned.
I seem to be getting pretty accurate results unlike others here, not sure if it's been fixed or my peerings are better:
Tests (Download):
Cloudflare: 78, 73, 73, 73
Netflix: 74, 78, 71, 69
Google: 70, 70, 70, 65
Speedtest.net: 68, 67, 70, 71
I know this doesn't mean too much alone, but for me seemed to produce on average the highest speed.
Lol, no he isn't awesome at all. CTO who hangs around is here is a way better person.
Under "About" section. That's a really weak argument to invent a new tool.
Why need a new programming language? Well, because we think that our users deserve more choices.
That does not fly well when someone needs to fork out $$$ to fund the activity.
Back to the topic, what users really need is a way to run all available tools (there are many speed test tools out there) and provide them a "full picture" in one shot. Sure, the test will take 3 mins to run but it would more useful if you're concerned about usefulness.
From a speed-test service, difference is indeed in who you test against: Location is a feature. No different than programming languages providing different features.
Without this service, you would not be able to speedtest towards cloudflare infrastructure at all. You'd need this at the very least to try to create the "monster" test-suite you suggest.
However, it is entirely impossible to provide "a full picture", simply because there is no such thing. In a given moment, there is a given possible throughput and latency for any given point A to point B, which holds no value for any other point, or any other time.
Cloudflare: 244 Mbps
Fast: 100Mbps
Speedtest.net: 83 Mbps
Cloudflare seems to consistently report higher than cap speeds due to 100k and 1mb files not engaging the traffic shaper, while the 10MB files seems to be in line with the other speed tests which they seem to do a continuous download.
Not that you'd know it, browsing the web.