About Our Broadband Speed Test
The Broadband Speed Test
Introduction
You’ve probably already used our broadband speed test. In this article we give some more information on:-
- Why you would want to test your broadband speed.
- How our broadband speed test is different.
Contents
- Introduction
- Why Test Your Broadband Speed
- How our Broadband Speed Test is Different
- Features and Benefits of our Broadband Speed Test
Why Test Your Broadband Speed?
Are you getting the service that you pay for?
Most broadband providers now offer standard services that deliver “up to” a maximum speed. For example, your service could be “up to 8Mb”.
The actual speed that you’ll get depends on a number of factors including:-
- Your distance from the exchange.
- The number of other people on your broadband circuit and how much they are downloading at a given moment.
- The quality of your network, particularly if you have a wireless network.
Our speed test lets you easily test your broadband. You can very quickly see:-
- The quality of your connection.
- Upload speed.
- Download speed.
- Latency (delay).
How our Broadband Speed Test is Different
Many sites now offer a broadband speed test. Unfortunately, many of these speed tests are “home grown” and don’t offer sufficient accuracy to be effective.
There are many issues in providing an effective speed test. Most home grown speed tests rely on simply timing how long it takes to send you a file and working out the speed that way. This simple approach doesn’t provide accurate or consistent results.
Some Incorrect Assumptions of Other Speed Tests
We’ve had a look at several of the well known broadband speed testers on the web. There are a few problems that many have in common that mean a less than accurate speed test result. Here are some of the problems:-
- Inaccurate file size. As an example, we found a .jpg file that was used as the file download. The actual file size was 518,095 bytes but the calculation used assumed the file was 500,000.
- Incorrectly assuming that downloading starts immediately. This is not the case. An initial delay is always present when requesting a file from a server.
- Using JavaScript for timing events. JavaScript cannot be considered to be accurate enough for timing events as it has a fairly high drift based on your computers internal clock.
Writing an Effective Speed Test
Writing an accurate broadband speed test needs specialist knowledge such as:-
- A detailed working knowledge of aspects of TCP/IP.
- Knowing about timer units versus accuracy in the programming language.
- Understanding basic mathematical concepts such as precision.
- A server that can support multiple simultaneous client speed tests.
- Being able to validate speed test results.
Our speed test is written and supported by the leaders in online network test tools. We pay a software license to ensure that the speed test that you use is the latest and most accurate available.
Features and Benefits of our Broadband Speed Test
- Professionally written speed test tool from specialists in networking.
- Uses low level TCP/IP “sockets” (where possible) for accurate results.
- Reports an overall QOS figure to monitor overall quality.
- See recent speed test results from others.
- Stores your test results for later retrieval *.
- Allows you to download your test results to Excel or Word *.
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