Out of 5 different speed test sites:
My internet speed results vary widely: from 1-6 mbps upload speed, and from 10-60 mbps download speed.
Even though I think server location would only affect ping results, I made sure all servers on the different sites are near my location. I also re-did the tests multiple times. The sites vary a lot from one another, but not too much among their own individual re-tests (put simply, sites will either consistently have slow results, or consistently have fast results).
With that noted, what could account for these drastically different results?
2 Answers
This is most likely to do with your ISP's connectivity and possibly "net neutrality issues".
The first step I would take would be to get MTR and then do MTR's to find out about latency, packet loss and routing to each location.
AS your results are consistent, its highly unlikely to be an issue with your computer, router or connection to your ISP. Its a lot more likely your ISP has a number of upstreams - some saturated, some not, and/or some sites are located on their network or via peering. It could also have to do with bandwidth managemet/pooling. Another, less likely - but nonetheless possible problem could be the connectivity of the speedtest sites.
I imagine lots of things could cause this.
First have you run each of these 10 times and averaged the results?
Is there anything slowing your computer down, if so fix this first.
Plug in a 2nd computer into the same network and run the tests on that machine.
Have a friend in another town run the same tests at about the same time of day.
In other words, do your homework, sorry but really, there is no easy answer to this. Perhaps they lie. Perhaps they are broken or inaccurate. Perhaps it's your modem or your computer. So many things involved. Learn to break complexity in half, and do a binary problem search rater than to hope for easy answers. ..
Then report back here. I would be curious to hear what you find out.
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