Think the test on this page was cool, then check out our newBroadband Speed Test! Own a website? You can put place the test on your site free of charge, complete with logging options and much more! Click on the graphic to your left to give it a spin and learn more!
Before you start the Bandwidth Test
This test accurately measures bandwidth and serves as a DSL speed test and Cable Modem Speed test to help visitors troubleshoot and locate bandwidth issues.
Before you start the Speed Test, please keep in mind that it uses TCP port 8500 to test packets. What does this mean? If you see a 'connect time out' message, then you need to tell your firewall to allow 198.104.150.202 (that's our server) to communicate with your computer using TCP port 8500.
Here is an example of the IP Security Policy on a XP machine:
Protocol = TCP, Source Port =8500, Destination Port = ANY, Source Address = 198.104.150.202, Source Mask = 255.255.255.255, Destination Address = My IP Address, Destination Mask = 255.255.255.255
Speed Test - No Graphic?
If you still can not run the bandwidth test, download the latest version of Java. If this does not work, please let me know and I'll work with you on this.
You can also try our very popular Broadband Speed Test and / or our Speed Test which also supports any language in the world!
It would be greatly appreciated if you would notify us of any problems with this speed test - Thank you!
Bandwidth Testing can be complicated!
There is a lot more to an internet speed test than meets the eye! When you measure bandwidth, be it DSL speed Test, Cable Modem Speed Test or any other, you have to consider the devices the packets of data travel through. A speed test also has to consider the technology used to deliver those packets of data and account for variations in speed.
To give you the most accurate results, our internet speed test was based on a research paper by Liang Cheng2 and Ivan Marsic from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. The paper explains in detail how to accurately measure Digital Subscriber Line Networks and is used by our speed test.
In researching Broadband Speed Tests, we also found some very 'unfriendly' user interfaces that left us confused as to the results. We have put great effort into providing an accurate, easy to understand graphical interface that clearly displays the results of the internet speed test.
For those of you interested in greater detail, keep reading; otherwise, just click the speed test start button. This speed test uses Java and will not work with java disabled.
Internet Speed Test Definitions
The following internet speed test terms are useful for understanding the Speed Test measurement report:
QOS
Represents the level of consistent download capacity provided by your Broadband or DSL providor. The higher QOS percentage, the higher the overall quality of the internet connection. High quality plus internet speed provides better connections for VoIP (voice over IP), Citrix and other high traffic applications.
This figure should come in around 80 or higher yet. This does not mean that you won't find success at lower speeds, but on average, the speed test should report >= 80.
RTT
The Round Trip Time (RTT) reports the total time in milliseconds (ms) to send a small data packet in our internet speed test and obtain a reply back. The faster (smaller) the RTT, the better broadband speed you'll have.
For Voice over IP, round trip delays can occur when results exceed 250 mSec or 150 mSec one way which is also considered the maximum desired one-way latency to achieve high-quality voice.
Max Pause
Max Pause is the longest pause recorded during the Broadband Speed Test data download. This should be a very small number. If not, it could indicate Internet speed congestion or a bad broadband connection.
Anything less that 100 would be ideal for this broadband speed test.
Speed Test - How It Works
Existing Internet Speed Tests - bandwidth testing techniques are not suitable because link asymmetry and ATM traffic shaping in xDSL deployments impact the accuracy of their speed test measurements.
Speed Test - Techniques
A number of techniques exist for Speed Test and bandwidth measurement. Most of them can be categorized into two groups. One group is a variant of pathchar based on the one-packet model. The disadvantage of this group is heavy overhead in bandwidth consumption. The other is a variant of packet-pair based on the packet-pair model. This group imposes lower overhead compared to the first group.
In theory, one- or two-packet techniques and the tailgating technique in internet speed tests and can get good estimation of xDSL link bandwidth. However, the existing tools do not regulate the probe packets so that ATM traffic shaper will regulate the probe packets for them by packet delay or packet drop.
One possible solution is that to explicitly regulate the probe traffic, but then it is difficult to specify the source rate for speed tests. That is why a stepwise scheme is proposed: in the first step of the bandwidth test, a rough estimate of the bandwidth is obtained and the subsequent probe traffic is regulated according to the estimation. Multi-packet technique is used to avoid explicit packet filtering to help accurately measure internet speed.
Broadband Tests - Traffic Shaping
Our broadband speed test take into account that ATM traffic shaping has a goal of regulating the traffic flow as per the parameters describing the negotiated QoS to achieve better network efficiency. The basic idea of ATM traffic shaping is buffering the packets/cells and controlling, mostly delaying, their entry into the network, thereby ensuring a more constant flow of traffic in the network.
DSL Speed Test - Application to Asymmetric DSL Networks
The DSL Speed Test understands that the asymmetric nature of ADSL networks makes it necessary to have different measurements methodologies for upstream and downstream cases. The speed tests are based upon the assumption that the upstream bandwidth is lower than the downstream bandwidth.
DSL Speed Test - Upstream methodology
A fixed number of UDP packets of uniform size are sent from the customer's computer (client) at a rate slightly higher than the nominal bottleneck bandwidth of the ADSL network during our DSL speed test. Probing traffic with the slightly higher rate (e.g., less than 10%) is necessary to saturate the pipe for testing. A server process on the Bandwidth Measurement Server, echoes back the packets as they arrive at the server end. The time difference, T, is measured between the arrival of the first packet and the last packet at the client end. During the broadband speed test, the upstream bottleneck link bandwidth, b1, is computed as: b1 = (NxPx8)/T [bps]
Bandwidth Test - Downstream methodology
A traffic generator at the Bandwidth Speed Test Measurement Server generates a downstream traffic. A receiving process at the client measures the arrival time of the packets. Because of the nature of ADSL, such that the upstream bandwidth is smaller than the downstream bandwidth, the client does not echo the probe packets back. Instead, the client computes the downstream bandwidth to accurately check internet speed.
Bandwidth Speed Test - Stepwise Scheme
The stepwise scheme consists of at least two steps during the speed test. It can be used for both downstream and upstream bandwidth measurements described in the previous section. The generated traffic should be smooth rather than bursty to avoid excessive ATM traffic shaping. The stepwise bandwidth measurement scheme runs several times and reports the maximum measured value as the link bandwidth.
During the first bandwidth measurement step, a small number of packets, e.g., 10, are sent sequentially back-to-back from the client to the server. This small number of packets will likely not be affected by ATM traffic shaping, as most ATM networks are capable of handling such small bursts. The computed result is used in the second step of the speed test as the trial bandwidth of the xDSL link.
The subsequent step(s) in our internet speed test assumes that the accurate xDSL bandwidth is close to the trial result obtained from the first step. A larger number of packets than that in the first step are used in the measurement to ensure that the results are convergent and in the end consistent. Had it not been for the first step that approximately determined the bandwidth, the sustained higher-than-provisioned traffic would result in a considerable loss or queuing delay caused by ATM traffic shaping, and this would end up providing inaccurate internet speed test results.
Internet Speed Test - Conclusion
In Summary, we have put a lot of time into designing the most accurate and easy to usespeed test on the internet, and for free! This whole project was inspired because I found too many broadband speed test sites that were either inaccurate, charging money or were just too confusing; users can simply start our speed test and know the results are accurate and instant!
More Cool Speed Tests
We have two other very popular speed tests to help you measure your bandwidth, plus, if you own a website, you can even install them on your server!
Internet Speed Testing on other servers
Here are other Bandwidth Tools (speed tests) that are hosted on high-end servers with plenty of bandwidth for those of you looking for further testing. I should also mention that these sites have been designed around our free speed tests.
