How accurate is speedtest.net?

Question

How accurate is the website speedtest.net in telling me how fast my internet speed is?

When I phone up my ISP and tell them I dont get the speeds I should be getting they keep saying that they are not accurate because they are designed for ADSL not cable (which is what im on). how true is this?

Answer 1

I believe that www.speedtest.net is accurate. I also use www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/ which I found out about from the Verizon tech who did the FiOS install at my place. You can also try myspeed.visualware.com as a third test. (The last one doesn't appear to do anything when you click the start test button, but it will come back in about 20-30 seconds.)

Regardless, all of them show I am getting 20.3-20.5 Mbps down and 4.3-4.5 Mbps up. I pay for 20/5, so I'm getting what I pay for. The upload has always been a little under the 5 Mbps, but it's consistent. This is not ADSL and is faster than most cable connections. Since I get what I pay for according to these tests and it's not ADSL, I'd conclude your cable ISP just doesn't want to deal with the problem.

Depending on your terms of service - especially for residential cable - they may not be legally required to do anything about it even if you aren't getting the service you are paying for. A lot of times their ToS exempt them from guaranteed quality of service.

Answer 2

well i put it to you this way, i work for a school as a student technician.  my tech director has at least 10 years experience and she thinks it works for our cable connected setup we have

Answer 3

one possible problem with speedtest.net is that if your connection has more bandwidth than the server has, you'll never get a number higher than the bandwidth to the server.

for instance, if your cable modem can move 6mb/s and the server is sitting behind a T-1 which is 1.5mb/s, then how would you ever get a speedtest reading faster than 1.5mb/s if thats all they've got?

the other issue is that, while you are testing, others may also be testing on that same server. that means that the test results can be inconsistent, due to load on the test server.

Answer 4

I think your ISP is not telling the truth

From what I know, most of the speed tests do a simple download and upload to check your speeds. Entire communication is done at IP level and the physical medium means nothing for these tests

I had Road Runner cable before I moved to my own house and I used speakeasy or CNET for my bandwidth testing. You can try http://reviews.cnet.com/internet-speed-t... They have an option to pick the connection type as cable and see if you get a different metric

Off late, I have been using http://www.dslreports.com/stest which tests for both cable and dsl (even though it says dslreports.com) and is very close to what I see

Good luck