Comment by yokoprime

1 day ago

may i suggest nettfart.no by the norwegian government as an alternative ? at least the name is fun

fast.com is my go-to in the rare case I need to check network speed these days

  • We used fast.com to speed test our new office internet connection and the next day got an irate email from corporate (who had argued we didn't need the new connection) about "watching Netflix all day". I imagine some C-level thought they had a real gotcha! moment until I showed them the site.

  • I read a while ago that certain ISPs will optimize the traffic to Netflix's servers, and so when you run fast.com (which is my default, by the way), you get your Internet speed for watching Netflix, but not necessarily for other things.

    • The opposite can also be true. T-Mobile throttles Netflix and fast.com on my 5g mobile plan to be less than 5Mbps where Speedtest shows > 200Mbps.

    • That was very relevant in some scenarios. When Spectrum was fighting with Netflix, they would force Netflix traffic to a peer circuit that was under provisioned as a shakedown tactic.

      Fast.com would detect that, and you could bypass that nonsense by changing your DNS.

    • Out of curiosity, I just compared my home wifi between fast.com and cloudflare's speed tedt and got similar results, completely and definitely disproving (n=1) my claim above.

While neat that a government operates this, I’m not sure it’s a viable alternative for most users given that the servers are AFAIK all in Norway. For example, the latency from my network was 150-200ms (compared to 6ms for the Speedtest.net server) and the speed test results appear less consistent than they may be in/near Norway.