The ultimate home network test 2022

Speed test results when your home network is the bottleneck

TL;DR

If your home network is the bottleneck, then no speed test will give a meaningful result.

Even worse, most speed tests measure a ridiculously slow download speed with an extremely large variance.

So if your speed test gives weird readings, chances are your home network is the bottleneck.

This test has been double checked!

This test has been double checked because it was highly likely that large background downloads occurred during testing. During a retest, however, the speed tests continued to give the same strange results.

 

Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Method of measurement
  3. Speed tests to test
  4. The results
  5. Conclusions
 

Introduction

As concluded in What a speed test measures more often than not you're measuring, with a speed test, the speed of your home network instead of the speed of your ISP.

Recently my ISP upgraded the download speed to 100 Mbps. As described in The most accurate speed test (and in Internet speed with trial and error ) you might assume that the delivered download speed is 12% higher than advertised. Hence I expect a download speed of 112 Mbps instead of 100 Mbps.

However the home network I use contains some older routers like the:

  1. Sitecom WL-303 Wireless Router 300N-XR
  2. Sweex RO001

Both routers have 4 100 Mbps Ethernet connections. Hence now my home network is the bottle neck.

This raises the question of what the consequences are for the measurement results of the various speed tests.

 

Method of measurement

The throughput of the home network is tested with several unique speed tests. Each speed test is tested at least 5 times with a clean Edge browser (Version 104.0.1293.14 (Official build) beta (64-bit)) on a wired Linux desktop.

 

Speed tests to test

For this speed test test this list of unique speed tests will be used.

 

The results

The following download speeds has been measured. Note that all values in Mbps.

  1. Bandwidth Place 80.40, 77.22, 76.92, 77.51, 77.54. Median: 77.51, Max value: 80.40
  2. Bredbandskollen 74.24, 78.08, 75.28, 68.37, 78.26. Median: 75.28, Max value: 78.26
  3. Broadband Internet Speed test (Gone) No meaningful results
  4. Broadband Speed Checker 24.08, 54.22, 48.67, 48.67, 45.70. Median: 48.67, Max value: 54.22
  5. Cloudflare 80.9, 79.2, 80.5, 78.7, 80.0. Median: 80.0, Max value: 80.9
  6. CompareSpeedTest (Gone) 69.47, 43.14, 47.80, 16.00, 39.09. Median: 43.14, Max value: 69.47
  7. Comparitech 88.94, 88.80, 89.19, 88.64, 88.75. Median: 88.80, Max value: 89.19
  8. DSLReports No meaningful results
  9. Fast 69, 70, 74, 66, 98. Median: 70, Max value: 98
  10. Fireprobe 80.09, 81.04, 77.47, 78.84, 81.00. Median: 80.09, Max value: 81.04
  11. Google Fiber 54.8, 69.3, 22.8, 6.05, 78.8. Median: 54.8, Max value: 78.8
  12. Internet Speed at a Glance 50..100, 50..100, 50..100, 50..100, 50..100. Median: 50..100, Max value: 50..100
  13. LibreSpeed 33.1, 62.3, 82.5, 78.3, 42.2. Median: 62.3, Max value: 82.5
  14. Measurement Lab 35.46, 11.6, 21.66, 29.80, 32.65. Median: 29.80, Max value: 35.46
  15. Meter.net 38.85, 78.54, 73.82, 50.47, 82.12. Median: 73.82, Max value: 82.12
  16. N Perf 32.51, 56.96, 39.76, 70.44, 20.17. Median: 39.76, Max value: 70.44
  17. Ookla Speedtest 56.78, 69.02, 76.58, 51.39, 71.57. Median: 69.02, Max value: 76.58
  18. Open Speed Test 16.27, 45.10, 26.97, 10.12, 27.90. Median: 26.97, Max value: 45.10
  19. RCN Speedtest (now: Astound Speedtest) 53.00, 55.00, 49.00, 35.00, 43.00. Median: 49.00, Max value: 55.00
  20. SamKnows No meaningful results
  21. Speedcheck™ 52.93, 17.57, 53.39, 55.07, 70.55. Median: 53.39, Max value: 70.55
  22. SpeedOf.me 91.09, 90.72, 90.72, 91.29, 91.87. Median: 91.09, Max value: 91.87
  23. SpeedSmart 12.54, 10.04, 5.33, 5.92, 13.50. Median: 10.04, Max value: 13.50
  24. Speedtest4.PHP No meaningful results
  25. TestMy.net 23.1, 18.2, 16.3, 18.1, 21.1. Median: 18.2, Max value: 23.1
  26. Toast 10, 25.6, 29, 30.6, 22.6. Median: 25.6, Max value: 30.6
  27. Which Broadband Speed Test 64.2, 70.0, 37.5, 66.3, 0.0. Median: 64.2, Max value: 70.0
  28. Xfinity xFi Speed Test 36.2, 9.3, 67.8, 62.6, 11.9. Median: 36.2, Max value: 67.8

Obviously every single speed test now measures underspeed.

Based on the above test and a comparison with the results of previous speed tests (2021, 2022), it can be concluded that the median is now (with 100Mbps) often lower than with a download speed of 75 Mbps:

  1. Cloudflare (median now: 80, median 2022 (with 75 Mbps): 75) +5
  2. Fireprobe (median now: 80, median 2022 (with 75 Mbps): 76) +4
  3. Meter.net (median now: 74, median 2022 (with 75 Mbps): 74) +/-0
  4. Bredbandskollen (median now: 76, median 2022 (with 75 Mbps): 78) -2
  5. Ookla Speedtest (median now: 69, median 2022 (with 75 Mbps): 76) -7
  6. Which Broadband Speed Test (median now: 64, median 2022 (with 75 Mbps): 72) -8
  7. LibreSpeed (median now: 62, median 2021 (with 75 Mbps): 80) -18
  8. TestMy.net (median now: 18, median 2022 (with 75 Mbps): 36) -18
  9. Google Fiber (median now: 55, median 2022 (with 75 Mbps): 76) -21
  10. Broadband Speed Checker (median now: 49, median 2022 (with 75 Mbps): 76) -27
  11. RCN (median now: 49, median 2021 (with 75 Mbps): 77) -28
  12. nPerf (median now: 40, median 2021 (with 75 Mbps): 77) -37
  13. CompareSpeedTest (median now: 43, median 2022 (with 75 Mbps): 81) -38
  14. Xfinity Speed Test (median now: 36, median 2021 (with 75 Mbps): 79) -43
  15. Toast (median now: 26, median 2021 (with 75 Mbps): 71) -45
  16. Measurement Lab (M-Lab) (median now: 30, median 2022 (with 75 Mbps): 76) -46
  17. Open Speed Test (median now: 27, median 2021 (with 75 Mbps): 79) -52
  18. SpeedSmart (median now: 10, median 2022 (with 75 Mbps): 75) -65

Even worse. Now, the following speed tests don give results at all:

  1. DSLReports
  2. SamKnows
 

Conclusions

  1. All speed tests, with the execption of Internet Speed at a Glance, show much lower speeds than expected when the home network is the bottleneck
  2. The fastest speeds are measured by:
    1. SpeedOf.me (median: 91 Mbps)
    2. Comparitech (median: 89 Mbps)
  3. The measurements vary much more now than in earlier tests
  4. Almost all of the speed tests have a significant lower median now compared with the download speed of 75 Mbps!