Smart. With a bit of SEO/marketing, this will become the way consumers judge their internet quality. If connection quality = ping to cloudflare then that puts cloudflare in a very strong negotiating position for peering agreements etc.
There are decent alternatives for this. Fast.com is hosted by Netflix, making them an excellent speedtest to check for service throttling. Google has a speedtest as well (Google "speed test" and it'll show a button).
The more of these tests start appearing, the better.
I've found Fast.com gamed sometimes when traveling in Asia/Europe, in the sense the ISP prioritizes Netflix traffic but normal traffic never gets within 20% of that Fast.com download speed or has much higher latency or something...?
With Cloudflare I'm guessing it's a more balanced measure.
> I've found Fast.com gamed sometimes … the ISP prioritizes Netflix traffic
The other side of this is why Netflix created Fast.com in the first place: ISPs throttling Netflix traffic (or just having poor peering arrangements that affected it) and blaming Netflix when customers complained about poor video quality (due to Netflix downgrading when experiencing congestion) because some speedtest (that likely the ISP prioritized, or at least knew it had better peering to) gave good numbers.
> With Cloudflare I'm guessing it's a more balanced measure.
Both serve the same purpose for their respective owners: to get good scores on fast.com an ISP can't throttle (or allowed to be throttled by avoidable congestion) Netflix traffic, to get good scores on speed.cloudflare.com they can't throttle (or allowed to be throttled by avoidable congestion) traffic to/from Cloudflair's topologically local DCs.
From a user's point of view using both, plus other tests, gives most meaningful results overall.
And they’ve figured out how to get around that. T-Mobile will show full speed on fast but if you have SD video enabled it’ll throttle Netflix videos but not fast.
Fast.com frequently tells me speeds that cannot exist. Why yes, I am definitely getting 1.2gbps over this gigabit Ethernet and 940mbps Internet connection.
Fast.com seemingly tries to compensate for the overhead. Bandwidth includes every bit on the wire and that's why "940mbps" internet is usually just normal gigabit with a bunch of packet headers and intentionally unused transmit space consuming the phantom 60mbps.
It's hard to guesstimate the exact bandwidth of the data that arrives in your browser because of differences in protocol, MTU, header compression and all that nonsense, especially over technologies like WiFi. In my experience, the WiFi throughput numbers seem spot on.
Their compensation makes for some hilarious statistics, but when you're downloading more than 200mbps the fast.com speedtest doesn't make much sense anyway. No way in hell is Netflix going to allow your single home internet connection to somehow pull in a full gigabit of streaming video. If you're your own ISP you can make it happen, but on the other hand you'll probably also know how to get statistics directly from your network hardware, in which case the fast.com numbers are useless but it still becomes a useful way to spike the load.
Netflix's speedtest is mostly reliable for what it's meant to do, which is solve the question of "my internet is fast but Netflix keeps buffering".
Edit: another factor to consider is that accurate timing has been disabled in most browsers because of side channel attacks like SPECTRE. It's possible that those are affecting your measurements at very high speeds.
I'm familiar with why they sell it as 940mbps vs gigabit; that doesn't concern me. I also don't buy the explanations of MTU, accurate timing, etc for one big reason: other sites like Speedtest.net and the Cloudflare speed test we're on the discussion thread for simply do not have this problem.
And of course, I'd not expect them to want me to pull down 1gbps of streaming video. But I would expect them to burst my connection when downloading videos for offline viewing, their own bandwidth permitting. Unused bandwidth at a point in time is wasted bandwidth. But more central to my original point, I'd also expect their browser-based speed test to not claim I'm going faster than is physically possible. Let's be honest - however they're measuring the actual connection speeds is not as accurate as some of the alternatives on the same playing field.
Netflix and Google both have servers colocated within ISPs' networks so this is probably why. Also SEA is a routing cesspool, many providers don't do settlement free peering and actively throttle IX routes, which is probably why your Internet was so slow.
Huh, that's strange, I usually see the opposite when I'm out and about (particularly in Europe/South America). Popular services like Netflix are throttled but downloading huge blobs from my own servers is much faster.
Here in Europe it's all equally fast. I don't remember ever having a throttled service, that sounds like a page out of the dystopian scenarios produced in the era where net neutrality legislation was being proposed/promoted ten years ago or something. There were rumors back then that bittorrent was being throttled (and corresponding protocol obfuscation and port changing) but I never had that myself
Well, Europe has lots of different countries and I've definitely been in countries that are considered to be in Europe where it's not equally fast, and using a VPN can speed up a lot of things.
Obviously there are faster and slower broadband connections; by "equally fast" I assume GP meant that various services can be reached without ISP choking or throttling, thanks to EU-wide network neutrality rules.
Fast.com was created specifically to pinpoint the throttling that was actively applied to Netflix in many occurrences back then. It seems to be mostly gone, especially since streaming video now accounts for >50% of web traffic you can't easily throttle it and hope no one notices.
In the USA specifically, I thought? Or which other regions has that happened in? I remember Comcast specifically having a monopoly in many areas and being able to pressure Netflix into getting money from both sides of the fiber (consumers and service providers)
> hosted by Netflix, making them an excellent speedtest to check for service throttling
That's exactly what the person above you meant about Cloudflare, right? By using the Netflix speedtest as a benchmark, you're promoting good connectivity to another commercial entity (for good or for bad, I don't mean to judge, just stating)
Netflix and Google (YouTube) are commercial entities that ISPs will intentionally throttle. Reduce the bandwidth for all Netflix servers to 5mbps and suddenly you're stuck watching at 480p or 720p, even if the connection can handle multiple 4k streams.
This is abused for "unlimited data" subscriptions that aren't unlimited when you actually try to consume more data than a standard subscription would allow you to. Of course that's completely illegal in countries with net neutrality laws, but not every country has those.
I can't think of a reason why a shitty ISP would throttle Cloudflare, as Cloudflare mostly hosts small files. As an ISP you want customers to think websites are nice and fast, because if only Netflix is slow, surely the problem lies with Netflix, right?
If speedtest.net says you have gigabit, Cloudflare says the same, and fast.com is giving you 5mbps, your ISP is messing with your bandwidth. It could be that Netflix has technical issues, but you'd read about those. That's why these tests are useful, and why we need more like them.
> Netflix and Google (YouTube) are commercial entities that ISPs will intentionally throttle.
In Nederland? I only heard these stories from the USA, and then specifically about monopoly ISPs with Netflix as trial target to see if they can get extra money from them
We're safe from this nonsense here in the Netherlands ever since KPN tried to blocked Skype on their network and upset legilators, and the EU has had net neutrality law for a while now. However, with most of the internet being developed over in the USA, the internet as a whole gets better with these features.
I haven't caught any real ISP here (only train/public WiFi). I don't trust Dutch ISPs to follow the law so I do run these checks every now and then.
At least one American mobile carrier overtly advertises "5G" with "unlimited data" followed by "DVD quality (480p) standard" video quality, but not every carrier in every country will be that direct.
I liked the detailed output of the M-LAB tests, unfortunately the amount of data has fallen over time. They'd also check for traffic shaping / blocking once upon a time. I think the project lasted only as long as the grad students who wrote it were there.
> I find fast.com massively overestimates my speeds.
I find fast.com more accurate than most, going by the throughput I see to/from other resources, particularly for upstream rates (which some, including Cloudflair, seem to significantly under-measure). Of course this may vary depending on line type (FTTC, “up to 67Mbit down n& 17 up”, generally seeing more like 50/12) and location (due to differences in local network conditions and peering between you & the speedtest) to I'm not surprised to hear you see the results quite different to those I experience.
> if you hide the tab running their speedtest you get even higher speeds
I suspect this is due to your browser throttling CPU use and timer granularity for background or occluded tabs⁰ reducing the accuracy of the readings, if the code isn't working to mitigate the effect of these throttles on the calculations.
> then that puts cloudflare in a very strong negotiating position for peering agreements etc.
Ideally settlement peering would exist for everyone. Cloudflare, like every other sane provider prefers IX routes over PNI since it's less expensive for everyone involved. There really shouldn't be a discussion about whether peering should be settlement free or not.
