Important Note: If you are trying to find out your best speed then never ever run speedtests over wireless, always run using a wired connection. Often the wireless connection is the bottle neck or a large source of variance. If you have a large difference between several wired speed tests and several wireless speed tests then try different wireless channels on your router or reposition your router away from walls and electrical interference and metal objects
Broadband speed tests are a hot topic at the moment with the likes of Channel Five’s The Gadget Show doing a worthwhile piece on broadband speed. They even have their own speed tester available to check your broadband speed and record it so they can report on it.
We decided to check out these speed testers so we gathered together four broadband speed test sites and my own home broadband connection which is supplied by BeThere and is rated at 24MB.
We ran the four broadband speed tests one after the other as quickly as possible and took screen shots. In between we downloaded a large file from a reliable site, in this case the 42MB Nvidia graphics drivers from www.nvidia.com.
Here are the results :
As you can see there is a massive difference between the speed test sites. The best test is (reaches for calculator) 330% higher than the worst. In between each test we downloaded the Nvidia drivers after clearing our browsers cache so we actually downloaded them each time. The download was consistently around the 1500-1600KB/s. Kilobytes, not kilobits.
Next we tried to see how consistent the results were from the speed tests. Speedtest.net’s results were way out on the maximum speed test and on the consistency tests they varied a lot. On four sequential tests we got results of 3768Kb/s, 4266Kb/s 5149Kb/s and 4651Kb/s. This is still way below the actual speed we could physically demonstrate we were getting from a simple website download.
Next, we tried Channel Five: The Gadget Show’s speed test, running multiple tests interspersed with the driver download to ensure we still had high speed connectivity. The driver test was consistent again averaging around 1580KB/s each time. As you can below the results vary wildly and neither shows the true speed I am demonstrably getting from the download.
The bottom line is a speed test is an interesting test and if it shows you a download speed of 4Mb/s then you can be reasonably sure that your internet connection can download at 4Mb/s but you cannot be sure that its maximum speed is 4Mb/s. If your speed test is consistently slow then try another speed test site, they are a great many out there, also try a real download and see what speed you are getting.
A few things to check if your speedtest is absolutely rubbish all the time as you may have a problem.
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