fast.com - new speed checker by Netflix
- Thread starter bledd
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(and gives far less information)
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No Ping check, no jitter check, no upload speed check., Why would you want to use this?
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As you say, not thorough, but pretty darn quick - suppose it depends what you need to test.
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Because the majority of Netflix users wouldn't have any tech savvie and will only care about / understand actual speed, rather than jitter and pings. I guess this speed test is supposed to be as big, clear and easy to use as Netflix itself.
Problem is latency and packet loss are just as "interfering" to streaming media (if not more-so) than raw bandwidth.
If I'm getting 7Mbps and zero jitter, zero packet loss and low (sub 25-30ms) latency that's a far better proposition than 60Mbps, 15-20ms jitter, 10% packet loss and 30-50ms latency. That site on the other hand will simply show that a 60Mbps connection is "higher" than a 7Mbps connection.
All that website will do is wrongly back people up who are having playback issues as "my speed is fine", causing more headaches for any actual technical support (be that netflix's own technical support, or otherwise).
Really if someone want's to simplify the output (not the test, that's pointless), test for jitter, latency, upstream, downstream and packet loss, but just give a score out of 10, 100, or a grade (of which you can drill down if you so feel), muchlike Windows 7's old WEI.
If I'm getting 7Mbps and zero jitter, zero packet loss and low (sub 25-30ms) latency that's a far better proposition than 60Mbps, 15-20ms jitter, 10% packet loss and 30-50ms latency. That site on the other hand will simply show that a 60Mbps connection is "higher" than a 7Mbps connection.
All that website will do is wrongly back people up who are having playback issues as "my speed is fine", causing more headaches for any actual technical support (be that netflix's own technical support, or otherwise).
Really if someone want's to simplify the output (not the test, that's pointless), test for jitter, latency, upstream, downstream and packet loss, but just give a score out of 10, 100, or a grade (of which you can drill down if you so feel), muchlike Windows 7's old WEI.
or fair?
Speedtest.net uses a crazy amount of threads. I hope that fast.com uses a single thread.
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest.html will show the difference between a single thread and multiple.
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As a reply above - doesn't have a single versus multiple threaded connections test and that's key for streaming and downloads.
Too many people think speedtest.net is the best, but its prioritised by ISPs and uses loads of threads which hide the real throughput for many tasks.
This is why so many VM cable users complain of streaming issues when speedtest.net shows 50Mb+ and wonder why.
Too many people think speedtest.net is the best, but its prioritised by ISPs and uses loads of threads which hide the real throughput for many tasks.
This is why so many VM cable users complain of streaming issues when speedtest.net shows 50Mb+ and wonder why.
I think you are confused. Showing single threaded vs multi threaded results on a speed test would have no bearing on the speed someone would get streaming on a single thread. That single threaded stream speed is entirely site dependant and has nothing to do with how fast or slow your connection is running.
Unfortunately for some customers with VM their single thread (single connection) speed is always a fraction of the total bandwdith they have. See one of several discussions on it http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Speed/Very-poor-HTTP-download-speed/td-p/3026879
I can test the same site using my home VM and FTTC services and also from/to my hosted servers and its only my VM connections that has the issue.
That's the route taken to your particular server though, which is nothing to do with your connections actual speed. A single threaded speed test would still be useless to someone wanting to test their single threaded speed to Youtube for example unless that test was to a server hosted in the exact same location as the Youtube video.
For example thinkbroadband's single threaded portion of it's speedtest just showed my full connection speed, if i were to do a single threaded FTP test to a server in London i might get the same max speed but to one in the Netherlands i might only get 1 or 2MB/s, the same test to a server in France might only get 500KB/s and again to Germany might be 5MB/s.
Seems people are missing the point of this; it's not intended as a measure of your connection performance on the whole, but rather a measure of your connection to Netflix's servers.
Nice thing is that it loads very quickly, seems to work on various platforms and there are no ads etc to interfere with the load times.
Nice thing is that it loads very quickly, seems to work on various platforms and there are no ads etc to interfere with the load times.