My Internet Download Speed Vs. Speedtest Result

Date:  Mar 8, 2014

Today, when I wake up, I saw my friend doing the Speedtest on his new improved network.

I always very sceptical about the “Speed Test” app from OOKLA.  The results may not mean anything.

It only useful when you compare the results as it has a reference point.  But the result may not be accurate too because the speedtest server has a limitation in terms of its web server capability.  More people using it, more slower it is.  Unless the end server is setup to allow only one person to use, than, you can get accurate result.

Let’s recap.  This is my home network.

Notice that I have this Seneoji Homeplug AV2 600Mbps devices from my main router to my network cabinet?

Haiz…. Don’t mentioned it.  This is due to unforeseen circumstances where I did not pull Cat6 cables from my network cabinet to the kitchen where I allow OpenNet to come into the home.  Haiz.  So, the solution is, I have to use Power Ethernet (i.e. Homeplug) to do it.  Homeplug is nice, but sometimes it is erratic when you have “Power Noise” and we cannot always remove or predict the power noise.  So, although it says 600Mbps, but the real throughput is sometimes much lesser.  May be between 50Mbps to 200Mbps depending on distance.

My home I think have only 100Mbps.  At the router, you get close to 100Mbps.  But after it goes thru the Power Line Ehternet, I get this.

Not sure why it is so low.  May be later I go and reset both my Sineoji.  Sometimes you run the network for so many months, must reset it.  HaHaHa.

The OOKA main site confirms the result.  

Speedtest to ViewQwest Server is like this for me.  Due to my design fault in home renovation.  HaHaHa.

 Let’s do a speedtest again.  As you can clearly see… lousy speedtest result.

Let’s try the SGIX speedtest too.  Same lousy result.

So, you think with this kind of speed test result, my demonstration of torrent download will fail right?  will be slow right?

Unfortunately, I don’t think so.

Let’s do the test yesterday again.  Download a torrent file.  Let’s use back the same file.

The big bang theory latest episode.  (of course, you have to remove yesterday file.  also this is for demonstration purpose only, file will be remove after downloaded).

So, as you can see, this is the power of un-blocked & un-throttled internet download!  Not even 2min (roughly about 1:30min) and it is done!  

So, who is the one telling you “Buy bigger bandwidth, download speed is better?”  You can now call him a liar!  Wahahahahaha

The key things to look for are 

1.  The ISP cannot block or throttle your bandwidth.  Throttle means, it actually monitor what you are downloading, if you are downloading things that the ISP don’t like or they think you are using too much bandwidth… They sell you 100Mbps does not mean that they will give you DEDICATED 100Mbps for you to use it by yourself.  It is most likely that they will oversubscribe the link by 10-30 times for consumers.  Oversubscribing means, you are sharing the 100Mbps with another 10 or 30x 100Mbps users.  Depending on the behaviour of these 10 or 30 people, you sometimes get a good bandwidth when the other 9 or 29 people or not using the network.  Or you will get sometimes good sometimes bad bandwidth.  On top of this over subscriptions of bandwidth, if the ISP don’t like you, most likely, they will throttle your bandwidth, means they put this

into your bandwidth usage restrictions.  Some better one will allow you to do email, web serving at full speed you paid for, and then, block or severely slow down your torrent downloads.  Some other better one will throttle the bandwidth during peak hours, and then allow you to do unlimited download of torrents during 2am-6am off peak hours.  Some clueless ISP will throttle the bandwidth on all traffic.  So, when you start downloading, your are penalised by the ISP to throttle your entire traffic including your email and web surfing.  So, you have to read HardwareZone forum to figure out from the mass users on who or which ISP is good ISP for not throttling your bandwidth.  One tip:  Do you know how much a throttling equipment cost?  VERY EXPENSIVE.  So, I do know some ISP did not throttle bandwidth because they simply has no money or do not want to spent some a huge amount of money to buy the throttling machines.  These ISP do not earn huge profits.  

2.  Depends on what you are looking for.  If you watch PPTV or Netflix, a high quality HD TV or movie streaming is about 6-7Mbps per streams.  So, don’t you think with a good 50Mbps it will be enough?  There is no such things as buy more get better quality.  I bet you if you buy 200Mbps and compare to the performance of 50Mbps, the quality of streaming is still the same.  The quality of streaming is due to whether your ISP has good peering with the content provider or not.  And the ISP cannot please so many people, they can only please the majority.  So, if majority watching netflix, PPTV, then, the ISP will find ways to make the peering better, or to host the content servers near to them.  So sorry for those who wants to watch specific TV streaming from not a major player.  

3.  Speed test is still a crap to conclude if the ISP is good or not.  It can only tells whether your link got problem or no problem by comparing to history results.  It is heavily depending on how popular the server it is, the more popular the speed test server, the more NOT ACCURATE it is.  Think about it, a computer has only limited computing power.  1 person accessing the web server Vs. 10,000 people accessing the same web server, who will be faster and who will be slower?

4.  Ping Test is even worst.  There is a setting on the ISP routers call prioritisation of packets. The ISP can prioritise the packets.  So, most of the ISP just put very low prioritisation on the PING packets.  So, whenever you do the ping test, you get erratic results, sometime good, sometime bad.  Imagin 1,000,000 trying to run automatic ping programs to ping the server, you as ISP, do you want to give prioritisation to these ping packets?  or you want to let your customers’ legitimate Email packets or web packets to go first?  Some ISP if they know a certain regulatory is doing constant check on the performance, they can prioritise the packet to the optimal performance, so that they always get a very good ping result regardless of all the hardware zones netizens screaming and complaint about the slowness.  Gzzz.. That’s bad isn’t it?

That’s it for today!