speed test question

ARe any speed test on-line better than others. I tried dslreport and my providers web speed test and they were similar. But immediately after I tried cnet's and it was way way way lower in the result for my speed. It was a third of what the others marked. Is there any way to be certain of my speed and where can I go to test speed confidently?

 

Essentally all speed tests are crap. Most of the ones I try will show me as having a max speed of about 50KB/sec down. Although I have no problem getting over 400KB/sec when downloading off a normal server.

So essentially the only way to get a reliable speed test is to simply find a big file (something over 100MBs) and download it. Just make sure hte server you're downloading from has speed to give. download.com and most major places cap you at around 200KB/sec max. SO if you download from there you won't see speeds higher then that.

Essentially this is how speed tests work, but they just send a really small file and then just tell you how fast it sent. Of course this method is flawed since they might not be sending fast, or there might be lag with that connection. So it basicly means speeds tests give off inaccurate results unless you send bigger files, and most places won't do that for a speed test because it wastes their bandwidth.

 

I like toast.net for testing my bandwidth.

http://performance.toast.net/default.asp?allservers=1&checkid=

As suggested by Coco, toast.net allows you to d/l a large file, and then determines how fast it took to load completely on your computer.

The one I just did for example, came back with these results:

"F-16 Fighting Falcons Test Results - Loaded 1,396,595 bytes in 5.718 seconds from TOAST.net I server."

The graphical result equates that to 1954 Kb per second. (That's quite an improvement over the 15 minutes per meg I used to get once upon a time.)

Toast.net's resulting graph also shows how your results might compare to other ISPs.

RayG