Josh worked for Microsoft for several years, specializing in computer repair of both hardware and software. Josh also built and maintained PCs and servers for IDM, and was responsible for maintaining local and offline backups for the company. His years of project management experience included a focus on Linux and macOS applications and troubleshooting, giving him intimate professional knowledge of all three major desktop operating systems. Josh Hendrickson was the Editor-in-Chief of Review Geek and a former How-To Geek Staff Writer with over a decade of experience.īefore writing for How-To Geek, Josh did project management, quality assurance testing, and sysadmin work at IDM Computer Solutions, which makes the popular UltraEdit text editor. However, you can get a good enough result to either satisfy your curiosity or check in on the speeds promised by your ISP. Ultimately, no matter which steps you take or how you measure, you won't get a perfectly accurate result. If you regularly have one or two video or audio streams going, start those before starting the internet speed test. Bypassing the router test should let you pick a server farther away. However, if you want results closer to real-world performance, use a browser or app test. Doing so removes some of the hoops the process has to jump through. If your router has a built-in speed test, use that instead of a browser test. You might even want to restart your router before running a speed test. Use an ethernet-connected device, choose the test server closest to you, and stop anything that might be taxing the internet connection (like a streaming service). Do you want to see if your ISP is genuinely providing the speeds it promised? Then, go for optimal conditions. Getting accurate test results depends on what you intend to measure. It's fine if you just want to brag about how great your ISP is (that's the idea), but it's bad for getting an idea of your real-world speeds. That means you'll get a faster result than you might with a Netflix or Google speed test. Their tests are optimized for ideal conditions, using servers close to you that are often maintained on the same ISP network you're testing from. However, you probably shouldn't rely on an ISP-generated speed test. Your ISP might also offer a speed test, like Comcast, Spectrum, or AT&T. The difference in server locations is why you likely see different speed results when trying different tests, like Ookla's, Netflix's, or Google's. In that scenario, your results may reflect a faster performance than your real-world usage. So, while your speed test may show incredibly fast streams, you might find that downloading a program is very slow if the server hosting the data is far away. Much of it is on computers far away-sometimes across the country or in another country. Once the client determines it has the correct connections to test your internet service, it downloads additional chunks of data, measures the amount downloaded in the time allotted, and presents a download speed.īut the entire internet isn't close to you. The speed limit hasn't changed, but more cars can pass through the same space at a faster rate thus, the 50th car will arrive sooner using a four-lane highway than it would on a two-lane. Opening additional connections is like adding more lanes to the highway. Imagine your internet service as a highway with a speed limit. The general idea is to tax your internet connection and see how much it can do simultaneously. If the client detects you have room to spare, it opens more connections to the server and downloads more data. At this point, two things are measured: how long it took to grab the fragment of data, and how much of your network resources it used. The client opens multiple connections to the server and attempts to download a small piece of data. After the ping is complete, the download test begins.
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