Speed Test results

Hi,
Are there big differences in the thinkbroadband speedtest and speedtest.net ?

Here shows around 552.85 Mbps
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/17384208642...

speedtest.net around 940 Mbps.
This test was slightly slower:
https://www.speedtest.net/result/17324889343

Downloading a Linux ISO via torrent and it was recording the speed at 96.5Mib/s

Is there way to get an accurate speed test ?

Thanks

In reply to a post by zMaliz:

Is there way to get an accurate speed test ?

They are all accurate in that they all show the speed between their location and yours. And dependent upon ISP and users' geographic locations, different speed testers may turn out to be more accurate for some more than others.

What you want is a speed tester which can saturate your line - if it is the capability of your line you want to know.

You could try fast.com

In reply to a post by zMaliz:

Is there way to get an accurate speed test ?

The speed tests are as accurate as the route to the host, so the speed you get from Thinkbroadband is the max speed your ISP was able to get you to that host. Others can get faster to Thinkbroadband. (The owners have demonstrated their speed test can go very fast)

If using Windows or macOS you can use TaskManager or Activity Monitor when downloading a large file, for gigabit you will need a very very large file; and check the data rate. Win10 and Win11's task manager make this easy.

If you are on Windows removing (not disabling) non Microsoft security products may improve speed; many take over the network stack.

As said, you can’t take any one speed tester, app or indeed a particular server that they point to as some gospel or “the best”…

As someone remarked on here recently, the whole internet is best efforts. Very true.

Take a “basket” approach. Look at the mean average and judge from that viewpoint rather than a single ‘great’ test (or single terrible test).

Edited by Pheasant (Sat 01-Feb-25 21:13:49)

In addition to what others have noted it would be worth knowing what you are trying to find out. If you are trying to find out how long it will take to download something then the only valid test is to download it. There is after all no point knowing how long it will take you to drive to Edinburgh if you, in fact, want to go to Liverpool.

If you want to know the fastest speed your line can handle then that could be tricky. The only valid test there would probably be to use a tester based at your telephone exchange. Or maybe even one based in your cabinet (for FTTC) or aggregation node (FTTP). But in all those cases the result wouldn't be all that helpful either because that's like knowing how quickly you can get out of your housing estate.

The best use of speed testers is to run them fairly frequently and learn to know what they typically report. That way you can spot faults if they don't report what they normally do. The Thinkbroadband tester is particularly good because it reports both single threaded and multi-threaded with graphs.

Of course even then the tester on its own doesn't tell you where the fault is but at least you can post the result somewhere on here (preferably your ISP's section) and if other people say they see the same thing you can perhaps rule out your equipment being the cause and use the responses as evidence when talking to support.

Edited by Andrue (Sat 01-Feb-25 21:14:26)

Thanks for the replies.

I just wanted to be sure I was capable of getting the speeds I'm paying for.
I was also curious about the differences seen with different speed tests.

All the comments make sense.
Thanks

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Take a “basket” approach. Look at the mean average and judge from that viewpoint rather than a single ‘great’ test (or single terrible test).

The median, max and third quartile are good to know. I find the average is not much use. If I get a Mean of 475.53 mb/s (actual figure from my router's monitoring for the past hour period) then what does that mean exactly? Is my Internet working fine or not? I can't tell.

If I have a median of 659.86 mb/s then that's much more useful, I know immediately that half of my speed tests lie to the left of this and the other half to right of this. This is a great ball park figure.

If I have a 3rd quartile of 793.63 mb/s and a max of 854.02 mb/s then it becomes immediately obvious that my Internet is fine and I don't have to go complaining for compensation.

Also worth knowing that some speedtests have been known to show speeds well in excess of what a line is capable of. Different speedtests use different algorithms and some are affected by the specific browser and OS they are running on.

Yes very mathematically precise. Possibly very slightly OTT too 😉

What I was saying to the OP was simply run a basket of tests at different times from different places. You can pretty quickly get a feel for what is about right for your connection, but by all means you can log all this in a spreadsheet and figure out the third quartile and the other stuff if you want to get quite scientific about the whole thing. I don’t think most folks will necessarily go that far…

Edited by Pheasant (Mon 03-Feb-25 21:37:39)

In reply to a post by zMaliz:

Hi,
Are there big differences in the thinkbroadband speedtest and speedtest.net ?

Here shows around 552.85 Mbps
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/17384208642...

speedtest.net around 940 Mbps.
This test was slightly slower:
https://www.speedtest.net/result/17324889343

Downloading a Linux ISO via torrent and it was recording the speed at 96.5Mib/s

Is there way to get an accurate speed test ?

Thanks

I use samknows speedtest very accurate! https://embeddable-speedtest.samknows.com/