Best internet speed tests?

[Keystone4132]

I just upgraded my AT&T Uverse internet service from 18mbps to 45mbps and expected to blown away by the wait time to load pages. Once again, I am disappointed by the absolute speed and variability of page load times.

So here is my question, what process should I use to determine that AT&T is actually delivering the service I am paying for (45mbps)?

I have run tests using 3 online services, with a MacBook Pro wired directly to the uverse router and got the following results:
speedtest.net 34.41
testmy.net 40.6
speedof.me 14.87

When I run the same tests on my desktop PC (hardwired, connecting through a Cisco switch) I get:

45.87
9.4
12.18

.....respectively.

I am not a techie, so don't understand the significance of what multithreading or using a HTML5 test has on my conclusions.

So, I'd like to know what tests the experts in this community rely on the most to determine whether the problem is with my ISP or my home network?

Thanks,
Keystone

 

[Kenifyable]

Traceroute to determine whether the problem is my ISP or my local network:
If the ping is sky-high between some places... there is an issue - and you can locate the issue with the Traceroute command.

Windows:
Start>Type "CMD">Type "tracert www.google.com"

You can do this with any website or IPadress.

 

[Raj1998]

Speedof.me shows the real-world bandwidth. So, if I were you I would trust it and would give my ISP a call.

 

[Keystone4132]

Thanks for this response. Traceroute is a new function for me so I really don't know how to interpret the results. I have run the diagnostic 3 times to Google and it takes 9 hops on average, 1-3 of which return "Request times out" and the highest time being 25ms.

What do I do with this information? Is this normal? Or does it indicate that I am not getting the speed I am paying for?

Any thoughts or guidance would be appreciated.

Thanks

 

[Keystone4132]

Speedof.me shows the real-world bandwidth. So, if I were you I would trust it and would give my ISP a call.

I want to agree that speedof.me is giving me the true speed but UVerse default to speedtest.net and then tell me they are living up to their side of the deal.

Maybe there is no single answer to the question but I kind of feel ripped off instead of excited that I have the most speed I can possibly pay for at Uverse.

 

[Kewlx25]

I am not a techie, so don't understand the significance of what multithreading or using a HTML5 test has on my conclusions.

TestMy.Net uses HTML5 because Flash is not very accurate because it does a large amount of buffering and hides the actual speed fluctuations and timings. Java is better, but still not perfect. HTML5 is built right into the browser and it has no such issues, as raw statistics are available.

TestMy.Net has an oversupply of bandwidth, huge amounts of peering with big backbone providers, and a quite accurate test.

What a multithreaded test means is downloading from multiple servers at the same time. While this can help tax your connection, it does not give you a good picture of how much bandwidth you will get from a single site.

When looking at my actual network usage and my speed results, I have to say that TestMy.Net is the best site I have found.

I just tried speedof.me. The values seemed to match what I saw on my network, so that's good. TestMy.Net seems to have more tools though, like auto-testing, and other stuff. But I will definitely use speedof.me in the future.

 

[allennnn]

I like speedof.me but it's missing all the good parts of speedtest.net , choice of Kb/ KB/ MB, server pick and you have to download and host the pic yourself, I can't make sense of the chart i just DL'd.

Print screen..

 

[Kewlx25]

I like how I got a 0ms ping to a server 200 miles away.

BTW, the blue graph is your mbit/s down and the yellow is your mbit/sec up.

As you can see in this pic, their server can't handle pushing the larger download to me. Notice how my performance peaks with the smaller transfer both times?

Still a 0ms ping. I guess this server can't handle sub 10ms pings