The RealSpeed speed test

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

The RealSpeed 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 100 Mbps and an average measured device internet speed of 100.7 Mbps, we conclude that the RealSpeed device speed test is a very accurate speed test (Accuracy score: 100/100).

Note that the value of 100.7 Mbps is the average of 3 measurements. We measured respectively 101, 101 and 100 Mbps for the device internet speed (and 101, 101, 101 Mbps for the router internet speed).

The results of the RealSpeed full test mode

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

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

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

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

Sub-optimal home network

Contrary to what we are used to, we test the RealSpeed ​​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 100.8 Mbps and the device's internet speed to be 90 Mbps.

The RealSpeed speed test

A measured router speed of 101 Mbps is very accurate (with 101 Mbps the accuracy score is 100/100).

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 RealSpeed speed test.

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

Pros

This RealSpeed speed test has the following pros:

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

Cons

This RealSpeed speed test has the following cons:

  1. RealSpeed does not work in combination with a VPN (or TOR)

When you are using a VPN or TOR, you can't use RealSpeed. You get the message that RealSpeed is not available on this network.

The error message: RealSpeed is not available on this network

When to use RealSpeed

If you suspect there are problems in your home network, RealSpeed 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 RealSpeed. Hence we still advise to test properly.

RealSpeed measures a download speed of 22.4 Mbps while downloading a large file

How we tested

We have tested the RealSpeed 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: 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 RealSpeed measures besides the device download speed also the router download speed (in the default mode).

Note also that it was not possible to test RealSpeed 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. RealSpeed is a sublime internet speed test.