Speed.cloudflare.com

https://speed.cloudflare.com/

by manigandham • 6 years ago

498 151 6 years ago

speed.cloudflare.com

harias• 6 years ago

Warning: The website starts an internet speed test as soon as you click on the link.

rkagerer• 6 years ago

Good, that's why I went there.

The name is fairly descriptive; it does what's advertised without any subterfuge. And there's a Pause button.

anonymousab2• 6 years ago

A lot of the commonly used speed tests have a start or Go button.

This isn't bad behaviour, people just may not expect it based on what they are used to.

capableweb8• 6 years ago

I thought it was gonna be a public dashboard of transfer bandwidth globally in the cloudflare network, so domain could have been more descriptive. How about "speedtest.cloudflare.com"?

gpm• 6 years ago

Not good. I didn't click on the link because I was worried it might, but I almost did.

If I had I would have probably brought at least one video conference to a halt.

surround• 6 years ago

And (as you might expect) Cloudflare collects and saves data from the test.

MadVikingGod• 6 years ago

I'm seeing that my upload speed (90M) is way under both what is advertised, and what other speed tests show. Is there a good way to test what my actual upload speed is?

drewg123• 6 years ago

I see the same 90Mb/s as you, so I suspect they are capping at 90Mb/s. For another test, try fast.com and click "more info" after the download stops.

I have fios 1Gb service. From clouldflare I see ~500Mb/s down and 90Mb/s up, and fast.com shows 600Mb/s down and 900Mb/s up.

dylanpyle• 6 years ago

anecdotally - my results here show approximately the speed i'm paying for, which is higher than 90

kube-system• 6 years ago

All of those tests show your actual upload speed. The whole concept of "upload speed" or "download speed" are incompletely defined questions. "Upload... to where?"

The number that your ISP gives you is likely what they provision for your connection between you and your ISP

The number that a speed test gives you is the measured bandwidth between you and the server on the other end. This is expected to be different for different routes across the internet.

If you want to test just the pipe between you and your ISP, many ISPs provide their own speed test servers for this purpose.

examples:

https://speedtest.xfinity.com

https://www.verizon.com/speedtest/

jlgaddis2• 6 years ago

Is there a good way to test what my actual upload speed is?

Yes, use iperf or netperf instead.

firecall2• 6 years ago

How do you make https://speed.cloudflare.com/ do the upload test?

It only shows a download test for me...

lame-robot-hoax• 6 years ago

They were having issues with uploads so they turned it off for now.

lumost2• 6 years ago

Something I find fascinating, over the last 5 years the main bottleneck on my internet connection has gone from the provider to my wifi, despite ~3 standard revisions in that time frame. It makes the notion of a wireless only provider somewhat appealing if they can manage similar speeds to wifi (within range of the 5G standard ).

feifan• 6 years ago

Same! Good thing we have ethernet :P

nicolaslem• 6 years ago

This! You have to admire the engineering that turned a coax cable that could barely handle a few kbps in the early 2000s into something as fast as my LAN today.

2bitencryption• 6 years ago

Speaking of this, my mind is in a constant battle between "ISPs like Comcast do nothing to improve the infrastructure they monopolize" and "ISPs like Comcast are doing amazing things like converting an old cable line into a 200mbps downlink and handling 'quarantine-level' network usage with ease".

Somehow I think both are true, I'm just not sure how it's possible...

fletchowns2• 6 years ago

100Mbps symmetrical cable internet was available some residential areas in the Bay Area in the early 2000s. Better upload than I have now in 2020!

Nextgrid• 6 years ago

It isn't as fast as your LAN. It's shared between dozens (hundreds?) of flats, the upload bandwidth is very low, latency is relatively high and security can be questionable if encryption is not enabled due to the shared nature of it.

ksec2• 6 years ago

Yes. Personally I am not at all happy with the direction WiFi is going. 802.11ax still sucks, compared to something like 4G LTE E-UTRA. Unfortunately MultiFire never took off.

And we are stuck with Gigabit Ethernet still. I know 10Gbps is too much to ask, but how about 5Gbps?

pickle-wizard• 6 years ago

There is 2.5Gig and 5Gig ethernet. It is often called MultiGigbit Ethernet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2.5GBASE-T_and_5GBASE-T

It is still not very common. The main use case for it is backhaul for access points in commercial settings.

anoraca• 6 years ago

You can get 10Gig ethernet cards for ~$120 and a 10Gig switch for ~$250. To me that seems like a reasonable price for anyone doing work that needs that kind of bandwidth.

kevstev• 6 years ago

This feels to me that its due more to a lack of demand. Ever since I got off Comcast 10Mbps down/1 up in 2009 and went to Fios, which IIRC was offering 35/10 at the time, I haven't don't think I have ever felt that network speeds have been a problem. I occasionally do large file transfers, but its usually the SD card or hard drives that are more speed constrained than the network itself.

You can get faster stuff, but its all business level and it gets very expensive quickly. Until 8k video becomes a real thing (and thus far, 4k video isn't even much of a thing), I don't see any real need for faster network speeds. Do you?

bityard2• 6 years ago

Why is 10 Gbps too much to ask? You can purchase 10 Gbps NICs and switches now. Works fine over cat6 which has been around for two decades, or the slightly newer cat6a if the building you own is measured in acres.

Yes, the switches and NICs cost more than 1 Gbps gear, but that was also true of 1 Gbps when 100 Mbps was the norm.

And if reusing existing cabling is not a constraint, used fiber+SFP switches on eBay are well within the reach of a hobbyist.

theandrewbailey• 6 years ago

Neat, but there doesn't seem to be a way to change the server you're connecting to.

I wondered why map markers were always airports:

Data center locations are tracked as airport codes and may not be 100% accurate.

falcolas• 6 years ago

Airport codes are virtually universal, even across country lines. They're also tied into many other bits of information, such as weather.

jFriedensreich• 6 years ago

the faq on the cloudflare website answers that: they dont publish datacenter locations for security reasons so mostly show the nearest airports on maps

TheSkyHasEyes• 6 years ago

Nice. Didn't see anything about a terminal client. Still looking for terminal clients beside speedtest-cli. Thanks.

bswinnerton• 6 years ago

iperf3 to a VM is probably your best bet.

Seirdy• 6 years ago

net7-client[0] is the reference implementation for doing speed tests with Measurement Lab, which is also behind the speed test widget in Google search results for the "speed test" query.

SpeedTest[1] is an alternative to speedtest-cli for the Ookla speed test, written in C++.

[0] https://github.com/m-lab/ndt7-client-go

[1] https://github.com/taganaka/SpeedTest

js24• 6 years ago

Cloudflare: 455 Mbps down / 73.1 Mbps up / Latency 13.0 ms / Jitter 2.26 ms / Server: Ashburn via IPv6.

Netflix (fast.com): 790 Mbps down / 950 Mbps up / Latency 8 ms unloaded, 12 ms loaded / Server: Ashburn via IPv6.

Ookla (speedtest.net): 928 Mbps down / 938 Mbps up / Ping 1 ms / Server: Raleigh via IPv4.

DSL Reports (http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest): 611 Mbps down / 929 Mbps up / ping 16-41ms / Servers: Houston, Dallas, Newcastle DE, Nashville TN, Dallas.

Location: Raleigh. Provider: AT&T fiber.

Test run using Safari, macOS 10.15.4, Thunderbolt Ethernet.

Edit: the small file sizes used for some of the tests seem to drag down the overall speed measurement quite a bit. It's biased against upload measurements too since there's download files sizes of 25MB and 100MB whereas upload tests only up to 10MB file size. But even there, something seems off. The upload measurements are much smaller for the same file sizes (e.g. 170 Mbps avg vs 7 Mbs average for a 10 kB file).

I question this methodology. I care most about my 1Gps when I'm downloading the latest version of Xcode or some other huge file. I guess the smaller sizes are to better emulate downloading web pages, but in that case, the latency is probably what matters more. Even with 1Gps, when I'm out in CA, sites typically feel faster.

Edit 2:

speedtest.googlefiber.net: 800-900 Mbps down / 800-900 Mbps up (multiple tests to servers in Charlotte, Raleigh, Atlanta, seems to bounce around each time I reload the page).

Speedtest (Ookla) with server manually set to Windstream in Ashburn, VA: 886 Mbps down, 900 Mbps up. Confirmed that my router is measuring the same amount, so Ookla isn't just making up these numbers.

kirktrue• 6 years ago

Now you're just showing off ;)

popped• 6 years ago

No I think this is important. Are they that wildly different from each other that they aren't that useful? Is one better than the rest?

cryptoquick4• 6 years ago

I also have synchronous gigabit fiber, and I was surprised to get way different results from the others. They're similar to yours. Not sure if this is on CloudFlare's end, or if there's something on my end or my ISP's end.

capableweb8• 6 years ago

Seeing the same so most likely on cloudflares side.

sixhobbits• 6 years ago

Isn't this because Netflix (fast.com) has better peering agreements with most ISPs while Cloudflare relies more on their own infrastructure?

capableweb8• 6 years ago

Don't think you can compare those two, as they are different things. Even if Cloudflare "relies more on their own infrastructure", they still have to have peering agreements with others, otherwise they can't accept/send traffic.

More likely, Netflix has better infrastructure and better peering agreements, than Cloudflare. Which is kind of surprising, since Netflix is supposedly a media company and Cloudflare is a "internet" company.

nahname• 6 years ago

Or the ISPs don't throttle traffic to fast.com

Apofis• 6 years ago

I thought Cloudflare also peered caching servers?

karmakaze2• 6 years ago

Cloudflare is reporting the p90 throughput of samples. Doubt the others are measuring this way.

js24• 6 years ago

Even the max rates reported under "Download Measurements" and "Upload Measurements" are slower than any other site I test against. The site also has a lot more variability from test to test.

I get download measurements anywhere from 400-800 Mbps, but mostly under 500 Mbps. I have yet to see an upload measurement above 100 Mbps.

This test just doesn't reflect real-world results for my Internet connection.

yxhuvud• 6 years ago

For me I get roughly the same download speed as the normal measurements (875Mbps), but upload is more than halved (423Mbps) compared to what other tests report (tests that I have more faith in, like bredbandskollen.se which is reputed to be very good for Swedish connections).

arghwhat5• 6 years ago

Note: ISPs provide speedtest.net servers themselves, so that never leaves the ISP and only tests the link to them.

fast.com likely has the exact same issue, as Netflix has content boxes at ISPs, although I can't say for sure.

Plus, even then, "speed" isn't absolute. It's all about agreements, routes, capacities and load. Test to specific targets of interest if you can, e.g. http://speedtest-nyc1.digitalocean.com/.

js24• 6 years ago

It depends what you want to measure of course. I provided results to a variety of servers besides my local fast.com and speedtest.net server. As well, I'm familiar with what speeds I get when downloading Xcode, when pulling binaries via Usenet, etc. The results from Cloudflare indicate to me a bottleneck on their end, and something is especially wonky with the upload result.

I get 860-910 Mbps down/ 180-372 Mbps up to NYC[1-3], TOR1, but I have to test using Chrome. Running the DO test under Safari is pegging the CPU on a Macbook Pro 2.7 Ghz i7. (The other speed tests run fine under Safari.)

EE84M3i• 6 years ago

Doesn't cloudflare also have boxes in ISPs? Youtube, Netflix, Facebook, Akamai, Cloudfront, etc all do. It's all relative.

leihca• 6 years ago

Thanks for the feedback, very much appreciated! I'm a product manager here at Cloudflare, responsible for launching this tool. Since the launch, we've found some issues that we're going to address:

- Especially for users with a very fast Internet connection, speed.cloudflare.com reports upload speeds much lower than expected figures. We don't yet know what is causing this but will disable the upload part of the test until we know more.

- In general reported download speeds are little lower than figures coming from other speed tests. We will revisit our methodology to understand the discrepancy.

- Re: the speed test automatically starting: we appreciate the feedback and understand why some users may not want this as default behavior. We will disable the auto-start for now.

In the meantime, we appreciate any and all feedback, please keep it coming: you can reach me at achiel [at] cloudflare.com

bitcoinrelay• 6 years ago

For Bitcoin, we run a open source relay network called FIBRE, and incredibly low latency network which uses some encoding tricks to gain significantly faster than TCP transmission of block data around the world. It's currently limited in part by the number of points of presence that can be reasonably operated from. Is there anybody at Cloudflare that would be interested in taking this on using your incredibly latency-diverse network?

hellcow• 6 years ago

- In general reported download speeds are little lower than figures coming from other speed tests. We will revisit our methodology to understand the discrepancy.

For what it's worth, Cloudflare shows me at 10mbps down, and Speedtest shows me at 160mbps (much closer to my expected 200mbps). This is a large difference.

jedberg• 6 years ago

I came here to make all the same feedback. My 1Gbps connection also massively under-reports.

extra88• 6 years ago

What do the little “i” icons do? I can’t click them using Safari or Chrome on an iPad.

r1ch• 6 years ago

speedtest.net (and I expect quite a few other speed tests) will open many connections to overcome slowness caused by TCP (low max window sizes and slow scaling). This is likely where the download discrepancy is coming from.

Personally I prefer the single TCP connection results as these tell me what I'm likely to see in a real-world situation such as web browsing with HTTP/2 or a large download.

nikisweeting• 6 years ago

I'm also getting 10 - 43mbps and 75ms+ ping w/ 60ms jitter on speed.Cloudflare (vs 550mbps and <10ms on fast.com).

I've confirmed the 500mbps speed I pay for in Montreal is accurate with my own iperf and iperf3 tests to physical servers I own in NYC, so it's not a "your ISP is colluding with the speedtest sites" thing. I've also confirmed I have a 1ms rtt to 8.8.8.8, and a 10ms rtt to 1.1.1.1 with ~2ms jitter by pinging them in terminal.

These CF test results worry me somewhat because I host a bunch of traffic on servers in my closet over Cloudflare Argo tunnels, does this mean those services are only able to push ~45mbps with 60ms ping via Cloudflare? Or is this just an artifact of something weird going on with the test methodology?

bscphil2• 6 years ago

Another bug report: the pop-up info boxes are hidden off the side of the screen on mobile Firefox. Screenshot: https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmRHQqSuJm4kMQB67hoiaYJ5fXc...

gonesilent2• 6 years ago

Don't let Viasat cheat your system...

putsjoe• 6 years ago

It seems to still be auto starting on page load for me. Chrome Android

jorams• 6 years ago

Interestingly, for me, it's reporting significantly higher speeds than I'm paying for, and than other speed tests report.

I'm paying for 100 Mbps down / 100 Mbps up, and every speedtest always comes very close. Upload usually a little higher. From experience the actual maximum speed is also roughly 12 to 13 MBps.

Cloudflare is reporting 667 Mbps down / 220 Mbps up.

byproxy• 6 years ago

It's also showing higher speeds, for me. Though only ~20Mbps higher on Cloudfare's speed test vs. other speed tests (and what I'm paying for).

Sami_Lehtinen• 6 years ago

It depends how it's tested. Clearly short burst test produces high numbers, because it gets really high, before traffic shaping (throttling) kicks in. In my case cloudflare reports almost 10x the speed I'm actually getting for prolonged downloads. Of course burst speed is much higher.

xoogler231• 6 years ago

Netflix has servers directly in the ISP datacenter.

Ookla also is generally run out of the isp datacenter.

Cloudflare has servers running at a PoP and doesn’t get the same performance

Youden• 6 years ago

You might know this but in case others don't, seeing different speed test results to different services/servers is completely normal.

A lot of people forget or don't understand the "net" part of "internet". The internet isn't a monolithic service you connect to. When your ISP offers you "1Gbps" internet, they're not guaranteeing that whatever your activity, you will get 1Gbps, they're just giving you a 1Gbps connection to their network.

Their network will then interconnect with other networks. Depending on the specifics of those interconnections, you will see different performance characteristics depending on what you're doing.

For example my ISP peers with a particular network that hosts servers ~600km away that I exchange a ton of data with. I get 1Gbps when I use my ISP. However when I use a different local ISP that doesn't peer with the remote network, I see significantly reduced speeds, because the route taken to exchange data isn't optimal.

I know the HN crowd is fairly technically competent but I've seen plenty of competent people who I think knew this in an abstract sense but it just hadn't clicked for them what the practical consequences were.

FridgeSeal• 6 years ago

Meanwhile in a major city in Australia:

44 Mbps down 30ms latency 12.5 ms jitter

What’s it like having internet that actually goes?

firecall2• 6 years ago

Meanwhile in a minor town in Australia:

26.9 Mbps down 11.4ms latency 1.96ms jitter

What’s it like having internet that actually goes?

(my synch speed is only 24.73 Mbps, so those numbers dont seem right...)

dubya2• 6 years ago

Luxury! 33.4 Mbps down 22.5 ms latency 8.5 ms jitter in a medium city in Tennessee, USA. Paying for up to 100 Mbps, but ~35 is consistent across times and sites.

terrywang2• 6 years ago

Metropolitan Sydney (upload is temporarily disabled)

Paying A$89 for TPG 100Mbps plan

Server location: Sydney Down 93.6Mbps Latency: 14.9ms Jitter: 4.97ms

Before students went back to school, upload bandwidth was throttled at 4~8Mbps (due to the congestion caused by nation wide WFH), now speedtest / fast.com reports 30~40Mbps...

Surprisingly, download bandwidth has not been affected like Optus Cable before (experienced 10Mbps or less for 100Mbps/2Mbps plan), facepalm.

spullara• 6 years ago

These are just like the results I get for 1Gbit comcast here in the bay area for the various services.

rckoepke• 6 years ago

I strongly prefer google's speedtest[0] as it's run through M-Labs (Measurement Labs). This group originally gained prominence doing distributed testing of ISP's to determine if they were blocking specific types of traffic (torrents, etc) I think 15 years ago or so.

M-Labs for me has the highest real-world accuracy, because it's designed to obfuscate the testing servers so that your ISP can't cheat or make itself look better by prioritizing M-Labs servers.

0: https://www.google.com/search?q=speedtest

karambir• 6 years ago

I think it will be similar to netflix fast.com but it selected Mumbai servers when I am in Delhi(CF has servers in Delhi). Maybe this is intentional?

Kept getting the test paused automatically on Firefox Dev Edition. Looking at the console:

    Error fetching https://speed.cloudflare.com/__down?measId=2826350041244361&bytes=1000: TypeError: can't access property "transferSize", i is undefined

heavymark• 6 years ago

On ethernet always get close to 1Gbps on Fast.com by CF shows consistently around 300-400. Wonder if CF is more accurate or Fast.com? I'm imagining CF but such a difference.

jedieaston• 6 years ago

Fast.com specifically measures your speed to a Netflix mirror, vs CloudFlare measuring your speed to a CloudFlare data center. Netflix probably has a box in your ISPs data center/head end that is closer to you (unless you live in a town with a CloudFlare data center, in which case the difference shouldn't be this drastic).

CF's score is probably more relevant since there's a lot more sites that are hosted there than netflix (which is just netflix).

mike_d• 6 years ago

Having built a few CDNs, I can tell you geographic proximity isn't a good metric for which POP is "best".

You might be located in Delhi, but maybe your ISP backhauls all your traffic to their head office in Mumbai for example. It wouldn't make sense to then ship your traffic back to Delhi just to serve it from the geographically closest location when Mumbai is your "network closest."

The Delhi POP might also be overloaded, or down for router maintenance, or they can serve your traffic cheaper from Mumbai.

mjmasn• 6 years ago

Interesting... I got a result of 44Mb/s down, which is 8 more than I pay for and 13 more than any other speed test shows (i.e. speedtest.net, fast.com, BT Wholesale speed check).

LargoLasskhyfv• 6 years ago

How precisely did they pinpoint you on the map? 100m/300ft here in a chromium derivative i reserve for stuff like that.

/me feels im/depressed.

edit: Latency varies but goes down to 6 to 5.5ms, similar for jitter, but even lower to just above 4ms. Line almost maxed out. Just missing 5up/2down. On really ancient HW :-)

capableweb8• 6 years ago

Your IP address (which is "owned" by your ISP) has a location assigned to it, usually the closest "router" run by your ISP. Depends on how your internet infrastructure looks where you live, but where I live, the map is off by ~3.56 km (~2.21 mi).

banana_giraffe• 6 years ago

It's about 8km off for me, in a different city.

They appear to be putting me exactly where MaxMind's GeoIP database thinks I am.

scarface74• 6 years ago

CloudFlare - 595/29.8

Netflix - 700/280

DslReports - 400/638

Speedtest (Okla) - 602/621

All of these are on a Dell using a USB3 Ethernet adapter. The only thing that I currently have running gigabit not through an adapter is my AppleTV4 running the speedtest app.

AppleTV 4/SpeedTest (Okla) - 925/751

anonymousab2• 6 years ago

Measuring and showing jitter by default is nice.

On the online gaming end of things it can be much more important than other metrics, depending on the genre. But there is an unfortunate amount of misconceptions floating around out there, and people tend to default to "higher speed = better" speed test results, when bandwidth doesn't really matter beyond a certain baseline.

maallooc• 6 years ago

897 / 343 Mbps, not too shabby but expected better.

In my region it seems only Azure manages to pump full gigabit up and down.

capableweb8• 6 years ago

Something seems severely wrong, either on Cloudflare's side, or on the way to the cloudflare edge that the test is measuring against. It's a shame as the UI gives you lots of information on just one page, especially like the jitter measurement which most speedtests don't seem to do anymore.

speed.cloudflare.com: 57.7Mbps (Server location: Madrid)

Fast.com: 320Mbps

Speedtest.net: 528.39Mpbs

gok• 6 years ago

It would be interesting to actually see how Anycast is finding the Cloudflare edge location, and how the traffic is getting routed.

jlgaddis2• 6 years ago

So run a traceroute?

hvenev2• 6 years ago

It doesn't work for me. When it starts, I get a bunch of errors:

Error fetching https://speed.cloudflare.com/__down?measId=4466372954803167&...: TypeError: i is undefined

Then it pauses itself. When I resume it, it runs for a few seconds (printing more errors) and pauses again.

I am using Firefox 76.0.1 on Fedora 32 x86_64. None of the adblocker addons I'm using are blocking anything.

_salmon• 6 years ago

Getting the same error with Firefox 75 on MacOS 10.14.5

Krasnol• 6 years ago

Works here with 76.0.2 on Windows 10

ChymeraXYZ• 6 years ago

Seems to be the case if you have a bit more locked down browser and don't allow all willy-nilly fingerprinting to happen.

hvenev2• 6 years ago

Well, my browser is not that locked down. I have enabled cookies and JavaScript, and I think I am only using the level 1 blocklist (as explained here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/content-blocking).

Edit: For the reference, I believe that the default should be at least as locked down as my thing (all third-party cookies blocked and so on).

zelly• 6 years ago

Yup doesn't work on Firefox. Also using Fedora.

jgrahamc3• 6 years ago

We're getting that fixed. Sorry about the trouble.

huhtenberg• 6 years ago

Doesn't work for me either, but not getting any errors logged on the console.

It just blinks "Running..." for 2 seconds, zooms in the map and goes into "Paused" state without any other changes to the page. There's a stream of smaller GET requests towards speed.cloudflare.com/__down, all resulting in 200.

hugoromano2• 6 years ago

Cloudflare: ▼ 567 Mbps ▲ 50 Mbps Payload 100Mb Latency 15ms

Netflix: ▼ 890 Mbps ▲ 160 Mbps Payload 720Mb Latency 13ms

Netflix Open Connect is inside my ISP network

microtonal• 6 years ago

Netflix Open Connect is inside my ISP network

And still a latency of 13ms? Here, Cloudflare, Netflix, Google, and Ookla Speedtest all have latencies of 4-6ms.

betaby• 6 years ago

Probably coax, only explanation of 13ms

hugoromano2• 6 years ago

I'm 900Km away from the datacentre via a submarine fibre but the way routing is done it feels it is metadata surveillance.

skilled• 6 years ago

The data on this page means nothing to me. And, I've grown accustomed to using Fast by Netflix - straight to the point.

cryptoquick4• 6 years ago

Oh, cool! CloudFlare, my favorite company, just made a speedtest!

- It starts as soon as you visit, other speed tests don't, which violates a user's consent.

- It collects and saves your data, also without asking.

- It gives wildly different results than other speedtests, with no explanation as to why.

Of course CloudFlare would screw up a speedtest. They screw up at everything else they do, so I'm 100% not surprised.

owenmarshall3• 6 years ago

It starts as soon as you visit, other speed tests don't, which violates a user's consent.

1) fast.com, 2) this feels like a reach, isn't "going to a speed test site" a pretty clear indicator of what the user intends to do?

It gives wildly different results than other speedtests, with no explanation as to why.

I'm confused what your platonic ideal of a speed test is. Off the top of my head, I may care about:

* "speed to my ISP"

* "speed to something I care about that's 'nearby'" (fast.com to a Netflix box peered close to me)

* "speed to a CDN" (speed.cloudflare.com)

* "speed to a random data center somewhere" (speedof.me and friends)

* "speed to a box I own"

I'd be amazed if I didn't see significant deviation between all of those measures.

rndgermandude• 6 years ago

I am on the fence about the consent thing. Yes, it's a speed test, but no, you don't really necessarily know that when it gets linked on some site. Burning through quite a bit of potentially metered data without asking first seems... rude, at the very least.

cryptoquick4• 6 years ago

It's not hard to put a button. And not putting one (and still collecting the resulting data) is against the law in several places around the world.

Trust me, if you have a gigabit fiber connection like mine, you would notice that their results are way, way off the mark. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23314368

zzzcpan2• 6 years ago

For your third point - the map, all the rendering and javascript overhead screw with the results, especially on weaker hardware, not to mention how loaded the server is and all the links on the way to the server.

cryptoquick4• 6 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23314728

vezycash• 6 years ago

From their FAQ: "Why build another speed test tool?

There are many speed test tools out there. Our mission is to help build a better Internet. To do so, we believe in giving users a choice of different services: you shouldn’t be tied to one provider and you should be able to compare results across different tools."

This tool would be more useful when it allows people to "compare" their speed with others.

Average speed in their country One network with another in the same country Compare a country's average speed with another Rank...

Add the benchmarks and put a share to social media button and HOPEFULLY.

One other thing - add (Megabytes per second)

jzoch• 6 years ago

Its showing my location as Kansas (0, US) despite being in SF. Tried a different browser, disabled add-ons...no dice.

TheFlyingFish• 6 years ago

Are you on IPv6 by any chance? I got the same thing, despite being in SoCal. I saw that the site was showing my IPv6 address, so I checked a couple of location databases and I'm getting results that are way off. A couple say New Jersey, one says "North America" and leaves it at that. I think that might match whatever Cloudflare is using since the dot is just in the middle of the US, i.e. Kansas.

Regardless, it's showing me as connecting to the LA server, which is almost undoubtedly the clostest PoP, so I'm not too concerned.

7ewis• 6 years ago

Love how Cloudflare keep coming out with all these new tools, 1.1.1.1 DNS, then VPN, isbgpsafeyet.com now this. The CEO is awesome too, and often hangs around HN.

I seem to be getting pretty accurate results unlike others here, not sure if it's been fixed or my peerings are better:

Tests (Download):

Cloudflare: 78, 73, 73, 73

Netflix: 74, 78, 71, 69

Google: 70, 70, 70, 65

Speedtest.net: 68, 67, 70, 71

I know this doesn't mean too much alone, but for me seemed to produce on average the highest speed.

capableweb8• 6 years ago

Seems to be degrading since I first tried one hour ago, so nothing been fixed. Most likely the edge servers are not as great as they are made out to be, so we're seeing wildly different results depending on the location/edge server you're connected to.

fermienrico2• 6 years ago

There are many speed test tools out there. Our mission is to help build a better Internet. To do so, we believe in giving users a choice of different services: you shouldn’t be tied to one provider and you should be able to compare results across different tools.

Under "About" section. That's a really weak argument to invent a new tool.

arghwhat5• 6 years ago

That's actually a really strong argument to invent a new tool, especially for speed tests. Each provider can never paint a full picture on their own, so having multiple things to test against is useful.

fermienrico2• 6 years ago

You can make that argument literally for everything and anything.

Why need a new programming language? Well, because we think that our users deserve more choices.

That does not fly well when someone needs to fork out $$$ to fund the activity.

Back to the topic, what users really need is a way to run all available tools (there are many speed test tools out there) and provide them a "full picture" in one shot. Sure, the test will take 3 mins to run but it would more useful if you're concerned about usefulness.

SigmundA2• 6 years ago

I have 100MBps Frontier FIOS:

Cloudflare: 244 Mbps

Fast: 100Mbps

Speedtest.net: 83 Mbps

Cloudflare seems to consistently report higher than cap speeds due to 100k and 1mb files not engaging the traffic shaper, while the 10MB files seems to be in line with the other speed tests which they seem to do a continuous download.

SigmundA2• 6 years ago

Also would be nice if the line chart had hover info to let you know which test it was running at the time.

morsch• 6 years ago

Seeing modern internet speeds still puts a grin on my face. It's so fast. I really should not be getting >100 Mbps sustained to a regional server and 50 Mbps across an ocean -- those will always be local area speeds in my mind.

Not that you'd know it, browsing the web.

yalogin• 6 years ago

Why would they start the test without warning like that? I would have probably preferred to opt out of their data collection process.

frouge• 6 years ago

ethernet: 860 \o/

wifi: 70 :'(

bityard2• 6 years ago

Lots of people here are reporting lower-than-expected speeds with the Cloudflare tool compared to other speed-test sites.

I thought it was pretty well known at this point that ISPs optimize traffic for speed-test sites and throttle a lot of regular traffic, especially during heavy-traffic times like the after-dinner Netflix bump. Since this is a new tool, a plausible explanation for lower speeds is that not all of the ISPs' network engineers have had a chance to prioritize Cloudflare's speed test traffic on their routers along with the other speed test tools.

Part of me wonders if this is part of a ploy by Cloudflare to avoid throttling by ISPs. If they design it right, the ISP can't tell the difference beween the speed test and regular CDN content, which would be extremely clever.

sneak• 6 years ago

The fast.com speedtest is run by Netflix, for presumably this same reason.

dmerks• 6 years ago

Download speed on current device: with ISP speed test: 230 Mbps with fast.com: 200 Mbps with speed.cloudflare.com: 43 Mbps

tonyb• 6 years ago

Having worked on several ISP networks that practice isn’t nearly as common as many people seam to think. It would be technically difficult to do that at the rate of a large ISP.

There could be capacity issues between an ISP and some content providers but that is different than throttling or optimizing traffic.

garaetjjte• 6 years ago

Would be nice to have manual IPv4/v6 switch.

dzonga• 6 years ago

you can easily tell, it's a react app. if you've developed react apps. subtle data rendering bugs.

odensc• 6 years ago

Care to point out any of these bugs or...?

nunez• 6 years ago

Results don't add up for me.

Fast.com: 620 Mbps Down, 650 Mbps Up, DFW/ATL

Dslreports: 889 Mbps down, 944 Mbps Up, LAX/IAH

Ookla: 919 Mbps down, 934 Mbps Up, DFW/Richardson

Speed.cloudflare.com: 118 Mbps down, DFW/Arlington (closest)

I then tried to run the speed test from cURL by sending a GET to the same URLs this test uses, but it seems that I can't ask for anything larger than a 100MB payload. This is unusual since other speed tests allow you to download/upload up to 1GB in each direction.

I'm wondering if this speed test should use larger files for fast connections.

chaz6• 6 years ago

It is a shame there is not an option to force IPv4 or IPv6. It defaults to IPv6 which is good, except that because my ISP does not offer IPv6 I am forced to use a tunnel, and that tunnel gives a misleading result compared to my ISP.

lewisj489• 6 years ago

Wait... is the London one IN Heathrow airport?

prirun• 6 years ago

This gives me NaN's when hovering over the 10K download test.

terrywang2• 6 years ago

Feel embarrassed when looking at the consumer Internet bandwidth other developed countries are having.

Meanwhile in Australia (down-under), I've waited for so long to get NBN (can only get HFC at my place which was like over 20 years old? At least at my hometown Shanghai, had something better than that in 2001 (GFW wasn't in shape back then) - I remember it clearly because that's when I started Linux journey by install Mandrake 8.1 ;-).

I was quite excited when finally enjoying 100Mbps down / 40Mbps up (I was told here in Oz consumer Internet upload is always capped at 40% of download bandwidth), before the cable was 100Mbps/2Mbps, useless to the way I abuse network (mainly transferring data to North America).

Have been experiencing congestion and degraded upload bandwidth (only 4Mbps ~ 8Mbps) since the pandemic, it did not restore until public school students went back to school (last week...), finally the infrastructure issue got fixed by the lift of social restrictions LMAO.

Speed.cloudflare.com

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