How relaible is the Thinkbroadband Speedtest.

Hi folks,

For a good number of years now I have used the Speedtest on Thinkbroadband site, but was always a bit skeptical of the results.

I am on full fibre 500 down with BT on a wired connection from ONT to Desktop, just ran a Thinkbroadband speed test and also one from Ookle and got the following results, which one do I trust?

Thanks.
[img]https://i.postimg.cc/r0Spdbqd/st1.jpg[/img]"]speedtest


[img]https://i.postimg.cc/xNn1LRd6/st2.jpg[/img]"]Speedtest 2

Edited by joemardo1 (Tue 14-May-24 12:49:14)

I've never had a reason to question TBB as they give me similar results to other sites.

Depends on what you are testing.

Most sites will show you a high end maximum speed achieved during the test. TBB will generally give you more of an average. So, with TBB if it runs slow but has some bursts at higher speeds then you will see a lower overall speed than a provider that shows you the best speed achieved.

In addition TBB has one data centre I believe. You may have congestion on other Internet links from your provider to that data centre. Other speed testers might have a number and they will target you at the one that gives the best result potentially avoiding any routes where there are slow downs (and therefore will show you the ideal conditions rather than what could be real world).

Some speed testers also have servers within the ISP network. If that is the case you are only testing the ISP network and not their onward connections to the Internet.

The other thing to say is that TBB sometimes overly taxes the processor in your device - it could be your device is not able to process the test fast enough and using Linux or a more powerful device would give you better results - Windows has a habit at times of slowing down the TBB test on some machines.

For raw speed of connection TBB is probably not the best. To get an idea of real world performance then TBB is probably more realistic.

Thanks,

I do have an old Desktop admittedly 14 and a half years old Amd Quad core Phenom 945 CPU, with 12 GB of Ram.

I don't have any problems running apps, the computers is fast enough.

Still think there is something up with the TBB speed tester.

Here is another speed test from another site.

https://ibb.co/9H9R8mc

Edited by joemardo1 (Tue 14-May-24 17:14:36)

If you downloaded a free Linux distribution and put it on a memory stick and rerun the test using that you might find it works better - there have been a number of people here that find the TBB client is too much for their machine running Windows. Other thing to try is open the task manager and watch the CPU whilst the test is running - see if it is maxing out.

Thanks,

The highest the Cpu has got to is 86% though a lot of the time a lot lower than that, the RAM highest is 40%

What does this https://www.fireprobe.net/gb speed test result for you?

I have never had a problem with TBB speed test as you can see.

Seems to work ok,

speedtest 4

I find its often pessimistic about my single-thread speed.



The download test files usually go faster as you have no browser overhead, especially on Linux where you can download to null or /tmp.
5GB.zip 30%[=========================================> ] 1.54G 112MB/s eta 36s

Its also only one server over one route via your ISP. The bigger speed tests have many different servers in the UK which may take completely different routes. So the odds of hitting congestion is much lower.

Edited by alexatkin (Thu 16-May-24 23:39:52)