The Google Fiber (Ookla) speed test

https://fiber.google.com/speedtest/ The Google Fiber (Ookla) speed test 0 4/5 stars ★★★★☆ Hans van der Graaf Hans van der Graaf

In general, the Google Fiber speed test is not a recommended speed test, mainly because this speed test is a clone of Ookla's Speedtest.

While we like this clone better than the original...

Ookla's Speedtest and its clones are accurate, use a lot of data and take a relatively long time to complete.

These three features account for 70% of the overall score we give to a speed test. It is therefore not surprising that almost all clones of Ookla's Speedtest have the same overall score.

For a proper comparison between Google Fiber (Ookla) vs Ookla, we will focus on the differences between Google Fiber (Ookla)'s speed test and Ookla's.

Since there are so many Ookla clones, we have created a separate list of Ookla clones for this purpose.

The Google Fiber (Ookla) speed test is owned by Google Fiber North America Inc. The first occurence on the Wayback Machine is from May 2022. More important is that since April 2023, speedtest.googlefiber.net redirects to fiber.google.com/speedtest.

Before April 2023, Google Fiber offered you a unique Google Fiber speed test instead of this Ookla clone.

Pros

The Google Fiber (Ookla) speed test has the following pros:

1. Significant less cookies than Ookla (3 instead of 21)
2. Ad-free
3. A significant higher Observatory score than Ookla (55 instead of 5)
4. Skip navigation button available

Cons

The Google Fiber (Ookla) speed test has the following cons:

1. No link to Ookla's privacy policy

When to use Google Fiber (Ookla)

If you just want to know what your internet speed is, then read our advice for a better speed than this Ookla clone.

If you want to ask Google Fiber North America Inc. what to do to get the advertised speed you have to test properly.

Preferably you use this speed test and perform this test on several days.

Keep in mind that your home network is usually the bottleneck.

How we tested

We have tested the Google Fiber (Ookla) speed test in a standardized way. This makes speed tests easy to compare.

The following results form the basis for this speed test review:

1. Abort/pause possible: no
2. Ad-free: yes
3. Average download speed of 3 measurements: 101.6 Mbps
4. Clear indication of the current focus: yes
5. Correct back button behavior: no
6. Flesch Reading Ease score of the privacy policy: - (see below)
7. Number of ACheckers known problems: - (see below)
8. Number of cookies: 3
9. Number of measured features: 5
10. Number of Wave errors: 1
11. Observatory score: 55
12. Tingtun score: 96.86
13. Total data use of 3 measurements: 778,84 MiBs
14. Total time to complete 3 tests: 120 seconds

Three privacy policies?

Google has had to state for years how they handle the privacy of their users. Google Fiber has a privacy notice and a privacy policy, but oddly enough, there is no reference to the third (and equally important) privacy policy of the Ookla speed test.

Because there is no clear document stating the privacy policy, we did not have a Flesch Reading Ease score.

AChecker has a problem

We were unable to record the number of known problems according to AChecker. AChecker returned the error The available memory is not enough to process this size of html.

When we inspect the this speed test with other tools (like Pingdom Website Speed Test and PageSpeed Insights), we find that the HTML is 2.2 MB (which is a lot, but not excessively much) and that performance has room for improvement.

However, we cannot explain why AChecker gives this error.