But Just Look at My Speed Tests!
While performing regular Internet speed tests can give you some basic data to begin to diagnose problems with your ISP or on your home network, you need to understand the limitations.
Wow, users love speed tests! Can’t get enough of ’em. The (ostensibly) good thing about our obsession with testing our Internet speed so much is that it has given companies like Ookla (the operator of speedtest.net) a ton of data on many, many ISP’s. They crunch this up to provide some generally reliable metrics on the real quality of those networks.
Of course nothing is that simple. The dark side of speed tests is that the vast majority of people who are running them don’t often do them correctly or consistently, so we are left with the old GIGO situation from the coding world – garbage in garbage out. This is especially troubling when that suspect data is added to the analytics, or used to make broad judgments on the quality of an ISP.
Lot’s of things can dramatically alter the results of any given speed test. Being on Wi-Fi vs hardwired, the type of device, what else may be running on that device, what other things might be using your connection at the same time, disruptions further out on the Internet, etc. all have a huge impact.
Of course we also have to mention the very real trend of ISP’s purposely skewing speed test results. One way is by hosting their own speed test servers, connected right to their network and optimized for favorable results. Look what the same Ookla (who is, after all, a business selling a product) says right on their website:
Give your users the best Speedtest results by having a local server that shows how good your service truly is…
Keep Speedtest traffic on your local network so your data throughput is as low and as clean as possible…
“But there are ways to circumvent that right? Pick different servers for the tests!” Sure, that works – as long as your ISP doesn’t intervene. It is relatively easy for any network operator to detect different types of data traffic and the destination of that traffic, so it is equally easy to prioritize a speed test. The network says “Hey, speed test in progress! Give that guy priority until it’s done in order to make us look good!”
The upshot of all of this is that if you are going to do speed tests, do them consistently and be skeptical of the results – either way. Oh, and us ISP’s hope you will do them sparingly. It’s not a stretch to say that too many people doing speed tests all the time can seriously bog down the rest of the network and just make issues seem worse. So next time your performance stinks, you can partially blame all those others who are running speed tests and causing your traffic to be held up!
