thinkbroadband Speed Test

Any ideas why the speed test has stopped working in Chrome on my Mac (OS X 10.9.1)? For the last week or so all I've been getting is the message "Unable to connect. Please try again later.". It still works in Safari and Firefox but that's of no use given the inaccurate readings those browsers give.

For what it's worth I've tried resetting Chrome and even reinstalling it but the problem persists.

Just tried in Chrome on OSX and the flash test works as expected

Mac OS X 10_9_1

Just tried mine again and still unable to connect.

Tried my wife's and my daughter's Macs and they're the same which would suggest a problem with my network. But then why would it still work in Safari and Firefox. And I have the same problem whilst at work anyway so all fingers now pointing at Chrome. Maybe an auto update has broken it. Anything obvious I should check?

Chrome version I have is 32.0.1700.77

Just updated to the same version and still works. If flash loads but test does not run it points to somethig blocking tcp port 8095

Well I'm at a loss. The fact that Safari and Firefox still work suggest that it's not my network or my Mac. However, I disabled my firewall and Sophos to see if that made a difference but it didn't. Same with starting Chrome from a command line explicitly allowing port 8095. Nothing.

Any logs I can (try to) decipher?

In reply to a post by ih4472:

Well I'm at a loss. The fact that Safari and Firefox still work suggest that it's not my network or my Mac. However, I disabled my firewall and Sophos to see if that made a difference but it didn't. Same with starting Chrome from a command line explicitly allowing port 8095. Nothing.

Any logs I can (try to) decipher?

Have the same Chrome version here in OSX and working fine. There aren't any logs no so a bit puzzling..

Double checked again at work today and it doesn't work.

So, I have multiple Macs on which the speed test doesn't work in Chrome but does in Safari and Firefox. It doesn't work on different networks, when the firewall and anti virus are turned off or when Chrome is started explicitly allowing port 8095. Looks like no more speed tests for me then.

And just to add to the puzzle, Chrome in Windows 8.1 running in Parallels on my Mac also works!

Completely removed Chrome from OS X again and reinstalled but still no joy. What I did notice though was despite removing all the preference files I could find the new install still had my pinned tabs so I must have missed something somewhere.

Will keep trying.

Hi,
Another user with the same symptoms and also running Sophos found that turning off all protection helped fix the problem for them:

http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/newsite/f/4296331-s...

Perhaps give that a try?

Thanks,

John

That's the culprit...

I only turned off the On Access scanner totally missing the "Block access to malicious websites..." and "Block malicious downloads from websites..." settings in the new Web Protection feature. Turning both these off allows the speed test to work.

Adding thinkbroadband.com or your IP 80.249.99.130 as an allowed website makes no difference so it's over to the Sophos forums to see if they can come up with something. I'll report back if they do.

Thanks for your help.

Edited by ih4472 (Mon 20-Jan-14 19:34:37)

Is it port 8095 it doesn't like?

I don't think so.

Waiting to see if I get an answer from the Sophos forum.

I've had exactly the same problem as you, on (OSX) 10.9.4 and (Chrome) 35.0.1916.153, with
Sophos Anti-Virus 9.0.11. The only way I could find to get the speed test to run was to turn off "block access to malicious websites..." and "block malicious downloads...". Making an exception for www.thinkbroadband.com didn't work.

The symptoms were that the test tries to connect to a server, then (sometimes) tries to connect to another one, then gives up and tells it's unable to connect to please try again later.

Meanwhile, there were no problems with Firefox (except that the TBBx1 results were about a fifth of the TBBx6 results, and the latter had a glitch to 91.8 on an 80Mbps FTTC connection).

I can't understand this. Surely Sophos would screw up the Firefox connection the same as the Chrome one?
Did you get anywhere on the Sophos forums?

Can you put asterisks in the exceptions box? You might find it works if you put *.thinkbroadband.com as the speedtest connects to some different servers to complete the test after it loads the flash.

Thanks,

john

Thanks for the suggestion!

The Sophos preferences don't allow asterisks. But a range *is* allowed, as in 80.249.99.130/24.

Sadly, that range doesn't work.

Aha! I found another /24 address range which *does* work.

I'm not sure that I should say here how I found it, or what exactly it is! But I would appreciate knowing whether the entire /24 is necessary. (Maybe a /28 or even a /30 is enough?...)

I suppose this really is Sophos's issue. Maybe they think an IP address is "malicious" if it hasn't got a DNS name?

pi12ca

I got absolutely nothing from the Sophos forums.

I know its pointing to sophos, but does it work when trying a speedtest via a chrome incognito window?

pi12ca

Bumped my question on the Sophos forums and got the following response from a moderator:

I can recreate this. I'll pass the thread over to our development team for comment.

Will let you know if/when I get anything else.

Got this confirming that they are aware of the issue and it will, hopefully, be fixed in the next update:

Looking at the data generated by thinkbroadband.com's site, they've rolled their own protocol which unfortunately includes very short handshake components. This is something which tripped up our identification of non-http content. This has already been improved, and the next update should fix this issue with thinkbroadband.com's speed test tool.

Web filtering components will always have some impact on performance testing, though once we can identify content as non-http and bypass it this interference should be minimal.

Both Safari and Firefox run their flash browser plugins as a separate process, which means our Web Protection feature doesn't filter it. The performance issues are unlikely to be related to our product; as Thinkbroadband acknowledge:

> Users of Firefox and Safari in OS X may see slow speeds on the 'TBB' download figures. This is due to an issue with Flash in these browsers. We suggest Apple users try the Google Chrome browser as this is unaffected.

Ookla's speedtest.net site measures performance using the HTTP protocol, so is not affected by this HTTP identification issues, but with Chrome the results wil include time taken to scan the content. Are you able to use their speed testing services instead?

In reply to a post by ih4472:

Got this confirming that they are aware of the issue and it will, hopefully, be fixed in the next update:

In an e-mail from Sophos?

seb