The Real Speed speed test

https://samknows.com/realspeed/ The Real Speed speed test 0 5/5 stars ★★★★★ Hans van der Graaf Tip

The Real Speed speed test is a sublime, highly recommended speed test, mainly because this speed test tests your router's internet speed and your device's internet speed.

The router speed test gives you the internet speed as provided by your ISP provider.

The device speed test gives you the internet speed as measured on your device. If this internet speed is lower than the internet speed as measured in the router speed test, then you know that your home network is the bottleneck.

 

With an adverstised speed of 125 Mbps and an average measured device internet speed of 126 Mbps, we conclude that the Real Speed device speed test is a very accurate speed test (Accuracy score: 100/100).

126 Mbps is correct

Note that it is correct that Real Speed measures 126 Mbps instead of 125 Mbps. This is because the ISP delivers 12% more than advertised, while a mainstream speed test indicates 10% less than measured.

Use our Internet Speed Calculator to calculate this yourself.

The results of the Real Speed full test mode

Real Speed has two test modes. The "Download only" and the "Full test" mode. The default is "Download only".

In the "Full test" mode Real Speed measures also the upload speed, the latency, jitter and packet loss from the router and your device.

The Real Speed speed test is a mainstream speed test. That is, this speed test measures the advertised speed.

The Real Speed speed test is owned by SamKnows Limited (SamKnows is part of Cisco since September 2023). The first working occurence of the Real Speed speed test in the Wayback Machine is November 2023 (although the URL has existed since April 2020).

Cisco Real Speed

Cisco now offers the Real Speed speed test on two URL's https://samknows.com/realspeed/ and https://realspeed.net.

This is exactly the same speed test.

Cisco also renamed the speed test from "SamKnows RealSpeed" to "Cisco Real Speed".

Sub-optimal home network

Contrary to what we are used to, we test the Real Speed speed test also on a sub-optimal home network. We do this by including a Sweex RO001 100 Mbps router in the home network. Since mainstream speed tests measure 90% of your true internet speed, we now expect the router's internet speed to be 126 Mbps (as mentioned above) and the device's internet speed to be 90 Mbps.

The Real Speed speed test while using a suboptimal home network

With a device speed of 92.7 Mbps and a router speed of 125 Mbps it is clear that our home network is the problem (as expected).

When we test our internet speed under this conditions with Ookla's Speedtest we measure 92.82 Mbps. Hence the measured device internet speed of 92.7 Mbps is comparable to Ookla's results.

As double check, we check the device internet speed with SpeedOf.me, this because SpeedOf.me was the number one in our test of realistic speed tests.

With SpeedOf.me we measure 99.93 Mbps. So the Sweex router indeed has a max througput of 100 Mbps.

The SamKnows Router Agent

The SamKnowns Router Agent is a software package (PDF) which could be installed in a router. It is released October 2017.

This agent offers similar functionality as the SamKnowns Whitebox, that is monitoring the performance of the broadband connection.

Whiteboxes are, like routers, small, embedded Linux devices. However, unlike SamKnows, ISP's are distributing tens of thousands (...) routers to customers every week.

By merging these device, or better said by installing the SamKnows Router Agent at millions of routers, millions of customers might nowadays use the Real Speed speed test.

When you use the Real Speed speed test, the SamKnows Router agent is instructed to perform a speed test and report the findings back to Real Speed.

Note that at ThousandEyes Cisco also explains how Real Speed works.

Pros

This Real Speed speed test has the following pros:

  1. The Real Speed speed test is an original speed test
  2. Real Speed measures your router speed test and your device speed test. This provides insight into whether there are problems in your home network

Cons

This Real Speed speed test has the following cons:

  1. When your router doesn't support Real Speed, only the device speed test works. However, it is not too clear that now only the device speed is measured
  2. When your router does support Real Speed, the router speed is not measured when you use a VPN (or TOR)
  3. Sometimes you might get the error message There was a problem running the router test. Try again a bit later.

Router test is not yet available for this network

When Real Speed can't connect the router, only the device speed test runs. At the bottom of the result page you might read Router test is not yet available for this network.. That is the only indication that Real Speed has only performed a device speed test.

The Real Speed result page shows only the device speed when the router is unavailable (in this case because a VPN is used)

There was a problem running the router test

Even if your router supports real speed, sometimes it can happen that a router test cannot be performed.

The message: There was a problem running the router test

When to use Real Speed

If you suspect there are problems in your home network, Real Speed is the speed test to use.

Note that one of the factors that might influence your measurements is the download of a large file while testing.

The screenshot below makes clear that that is also the case when you use Real Speed. Hence we still advise to test properly.

Real Speed measures a download speed of 22.4 Mbps while downloading a large file

How we tested

We have tested the Real Speed speed test in a standardized way. This makes speed tests easy to compare.

Note the test results below are from July 2, 2024. At that time our ISP delivered 100 Mbps.

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: 100.7 Mbps (measured at the device)
  4. Clear indication of the current focus: yes
  5. Correct back button behavior: yes
  6. Flesch Reading Ease score of the privacy policy: 43.78
  7. Number of ACheckers known problems: 0
  8. Number of cookies: 10
  9. Number of measured features: 1 (based on the default "Download only test")
  10. Number of Wave errors: 0
  11. Observatory score: 70
  12. Tingtun score: -
  13. Total data use of 3 measurements: 292.74 MiBs (measured at the device only!)
  14. Total time to complete 3 tests: 58 seconds

Note that our standardized speed test test assumes that a speed test only tests the device internet speed. Hence you might conclude that the total data use should be doubled (when you assume that the router speed test consumes the same amount of data as the device speed test). This would lower the data usage score.

The number of measured features is 1, because Real Speed measures besides the device download speed also the router download speed (in the default mode).

Note also that it was not possible to test Real Speed with Tingtun. We would not be surprised if this were a high score, which would substantially increase the accessibility score.

Ultimately, that doesn't matter for our final verdict. Real Speed is a sublime internet speed test.