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Ahh Speedtest.

Running a speedtest and reporting the results is akin to running a ApacheBench on your index.html, recording how fast it goes, then telling everyone your PHP server can serve pages that fast.

Speedtest by default finds a local server, which is almost always delivered over local uncontended peering. Of course you're going to see great results, you might as well be testing to a Speedtest server plugged into your LAN.

Run speedtests to ~10 sites around the country and a few around the globe and report those figures.




But that's not what they want to measure. All they want to know is the speed of the local link, and speedtest measures that.

It's not everything you need to know, but it does provide the desired measurement.


People want to measure the bottlenecks they can control. Speedtest shows what speed your first few hops get. In most cases, "The Internet" is much faster than their DSL line. In this case, that's not true, but there's not much that can be done by the end user.




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