

Ask HN: Are Internet speed tests accurate? - jamessun

Are internet speed tests, like those provided by Ookla or Speakeasy, accurate? How similar&#x2F;dissimilar are the methodologies used by different speed tests? Are there more realistic ways to measure your internet speed for the average HN reader?
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med00d
The accuracy can vary, but for the most part I've found them to display
results that are right in line with what ISPs quote their speeds to be. Ookla
explains the way that their speed tests work here
-[https://support.speedtest.net/hc/en-
us/articles/203845400-Ho...](https://support.speedtest.net/hc/en-
us/articles/203845400-How-does-the-test-itself-work-How-is-the-result-
calculated-) and that's the idea behind all of them.

Probably the most inaccurate representation of speed that I've come across was
when I had just done a firewall replacement for a customer and I didn't catch
that their ISP had the speed/duplex settings on their equipment set to a hard-
coded 100/Full-duplex. The firewall that I installed was set to auto-negotiate
and since the ISP's equipment was hard-coded, the firewall negotiated at
100/Half-duplex. If you're not familiar with what half-duplex means, basically
it means that you can still send & receive data, but you can only do one at a
time -vs- full-duplex where you can send and receive at the same time. The
problem with a speed test is that the download test only downloads, and the
upload test only uploads, so in the case of the duplex mismatch, the speed
test looked fine. As soon as users came in the next morning and put the
internet connection under load, they began complaining about internet speeds
and we realized that we had a problem with the duplex settings.

Another way to test is a utility called iperf, but it's a lot more complicated
and requires you to have access to the remote machine. -
[https://iperf.fr/](https://iperf.fr/)

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Joona
No. Servers get saturated, some links are slower than others and your ISP may
prioritize the traffic. Best way of testing I know of is either using your own
server or grabbing a null file from a known host (at least funet in Finland).

