Internet Speed Test

Usually Wi-Fi rather than the line. A plan sold as 500 Mbps is measured at the socket, and by the time it has crossed a busy 2.4 GHz channel, a wall or two and an older laptop's wireless card, a fraction of that reaching the browser is normal. Test again on an Ethernet cable, or standing next to the router, and compare. Other things on the network count too — one 4K stream or a phone backing up is taking its share while you test.

Bufferbloat is delay caused by your own equipment queuing data instead of dropping it. The symptom is familiar: everything is fine until someone starts a big download, and then calls stutter and pages hang even though the speed test says the connection is fast. This test measures ping while the line is saturated and grades the increase. An A or A+ means the connection stays responsive when busy. A D or F means it does not, and that is worth fixing — usually by turning on Smart Queue Management or SQM in the router — regardless of how high the download number is.

It depends entirely on how fast your connection is, because the test runs for a fixed time rather than a fixed size — a 20 Mbps line moves about 25 MB, a gigabit line can move several hundred. On mobile data, open Test settings and lower the data limit, or shorten the download time. The results panel always tells you exactly how much was used.

Because it is showing the speed over the last fraction of a second rather than the average so far, which is what makes a Wi-Fi drop-out or a noisy line visible instead of smoothed away. The final figure is the average across the whole measurement window, with the slow-start ramp at the beginning excluded.

Connections is how many transfers run at once. Several at once is the standard way to measure a fast line, because one connection often cannot fill it on its own — but a single connection is closer to what one download or one video stream will really get, so both answers are useful. Longer tests are more accurate on unstable connections and use more data.

Nothing is stored. The uploaded data is random noise that is read and thrown away, and no result is written to any database. The share link puts the numbers in the part of the URL after the # — a fragment, which browsers never send to a server — so opening a shared link tells us nothing about who opened it.

Under about 30 ms is excellent and under 60 ms is fine for competitive gaming and video calls. Jitter matters as much as ping for anything live: it is how much the round trip varies between one probe and the next, and steady jitter under about 10 ms is what keeps a call clear. A line that alternates between 20 ms and 120 ms is far worse for a call than one that sits steadily at 90 ms, even though the averages look similar.

The nearest edge location of the CDN in front of this site, which the results panel names. That is the right thing to measure for everyday use — it is roughly the distance to a streaming service or a big website — but it does mean a very long-distance connection to one specific server elsewhere in the world can be slower than the figure here.