Speed Test
What defines your Internet connection?
Do you know how many factors will determine your PC or smartphone's final download and upload bandwidth? Many. Too many! But let's try to break them down.
At the highest level of the Internet map, the worldwide Tier 1 networks develop and connect each country at different rates and already defines how interconnected your country. Tier 2 and ISP are then renting portions of this Tier 1 infrastructure to sell Internet services to final users and businesses.
That's now where you can act by choosing the right Internet connection for your needs! The prices and offers diverge a lot between continents and countries. If you target the lowest cost, you'll likely end up with a classic ADSL connection limiting to 20 Mbps and high latency (minimum 100 ms ping). You may upgrade for a faster fiber optic connection providing you with speed up to 1 Gbps and 1 ms latency in several regions. I invite you to regularly call you Internet provider (ISP) to ask if they can kindly upgrade your connection bandwidth at no cost. As they yearly update their network, devices and offers, they often technically can offer those kind of commercial offers and gestures. ADSL connections' download and upload speeds are often asynchronous as your ISP provide weaker upload than download connection.
For your smartphone, tablet or finally any mobile connection, you'll definitely need any 3 or 4G mobile broadband connection that you can get in your favorite mobile carrier. Speeds can also vary a lot depending on your country and if your live in the city or not. You can discover the actual average mobile 3G/4G coverage and speed for every country at OpenSignal. As you're moving, your speed rate and quality will plummet as the IP packets will often get corrupt. You can expect theoretical rates fluctuating between 4 and 150 Mbps. Mobile Internet connections are much more symmetric and your upload speed will likely be the same as you download speed.
The specifications and quality of the devices and hardware (phones, antennas, routers, repeater, modulators, etc) you use to 'physically' connect to your network and its environment (hills, walls, fridges, other interferring networks, etc) will limit the maximum Internet speed available to your Operating System (OS). Please check this article from NetworkWorld to understand better WiFi networks interference.
Finally, any kind of local software can potentially throttle your connection. Any wrongly-set-up firewall, any background process (cloud files and email sync, FTP, torrent, etc), spamware/malware, proxy or VPN, many (non-)useful features that can shrink your own bandwidth.
In all those different situations, you can now make complete and reliable Internet speed tests to isolate and determine what's optimizing your connection, and what's not. This Internet speedometer is powered by the more-than-awesome Cloudflare CDN network to make your tests with servers as close as possible from your actual location to get the most realistics measurements at any time. Cloudflare has already deployed more than 100 datacenters around the world. This guarantees the measured speeds are always as close as possible to your actual download and upload bandwidth. Happy testing!
G Suite.Tools' Speed Test is solely powered by HTML5. This means you don't need insecure Flash software installed on your computer and that any device (smartphone, tablet, smart TV, etc) with a browser can perform this test.
Results
In less than a minute, you'll obtain important information about your Internet connection speed and quality.
We will confirm your IP address and the precise location of the server used for your test. This plots the context of the measurements and future results.
The tool starts by checking the 'ping' delay of your connection up to this server. This is the return-trip duration between your device and our server (a.k.a. latency). You'll notice five averages of latency tests. I really advise you to stay under 50 ms to keep a correct Internet speed.
The tool then proceeds to the incremental download speed measurements until getting a stable average over 8 seconds.
The same process is followed for the upload rate estimation
Greetings
- Thanks to Cloudflare for backing up this tool.
- Credit to enryIT for developing the base of this speedometer.