Internet Quality Tests

Most tests for Internet service focus on the capacity angle (speed) and often ignore the more relevant qualitative aspects as measured by latencies under working conditions. A few new tests now reveal this information.

The old DSLreports bufferbloat test used to be the industry standard, but their service has degraded over time (insufficient test nodes) so we’ve discontinued our IQtest that was based on it. We now recommend the Waveform Bufferbloat test. It is generally good but is sensitive to the browser and machine it is run from. At times it will incorrectly report bloat when the latencies are due to other software running on the same computer (antivirus utilities being a common cause). We recommend using Chrome on all platforms to run it.

The latest mobile Apps and Web site from Ookla at Speedtest.net now report the latencies encountered during the tests. Here are two tests, the first without traffic management showing huge latencies and the second with effective traffic management. Note that even though the ‘speed’ is lower, the low latencies allow for more data to flow and for user responsiveness to be high.

Here is an article from Ookla on these new test elements

Whether you use the the Web test or the Android or iOS apps over WiFi, please stand close to the router. If you have an iPad with USB-C, an Ethernet adapter can be used to run the test wired for the greatest accuracy, same for laptops.

For macOS users, Apple has introduced a new responsiveness test that measures the connection's Responses Per Minute (RPM).

To run it, open the Terminal app, then type 'networkQuality' and press enter. The test runs for 20 seconds and reports results as shown in this example.

$ networkQuality

==== SUMMARY ====

Upload capacity: 25.707 Mbps

Download capacity: 498.719 Mbps

Upload flows: 16

Download flows: 12

Responsiveness: High (1456 RPM)

You can measure each direction independently with

 networkQuality -s