The Waveform (Bufferbloat and Internet) speed test

https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat The Waveform (Bufferbloat and Internet) speed test 0 3/5 stars ★★★☆☆ Hans van der Graaf

In general, the Waveform (Bufferbloat and Internet) speed test is not a recommended speed test, mainly because this speed test is very slow and consumes a lot of data. Besides that there are more accurate speed tests.

 

With an adverstised speed of 100 Mbps and an average measured internet speed of 101.3 Mbps, we conclude that the Waveform (Bufferbloat and Internet) speed test is an accurate speed test (Accuracy score: 99/100). This is despite the relatively large variation in the measurements (100.7, 103.6 and 99,7 Mbps).

The Waveform (Bufferbloat and Internet) speed test is a mainstream speed test. That is, this speed test measures the advertised speed.

The Waveform (Bufferbloat and Internet) speed test is owned by Waveform. Waveform is the rebranding of the RepeaterStore (because nowadays they sell more than repeaters).

With the Bufferbloat and Internet speed test, Waveform tries to make it clear that not every (home) network consists of modern routers that have taken measures against bufferbloat.

Bufferbloat

According to bufferbloat.net, bufferbloat is the undesirable latency that comes from a router or other network equipment buffering too much data.

Wikipedia states that bufferbloat is a cause of high latency and jitter in packet-switched networks caused by excess buffering of packets.

In practice bufferbloat happens when you download a large file. Other more urgent traffic (voice, video) is delayed as a result.

Modern routers have the ability to prioritize all internet traffic that needs to be processed quickly (audio, video) over downloads. This prevents bufferbloat and improves the Quality of Service.

Waveform states that Smart Queue Management (SQM) (algorithms such as cake, fq_codel and PIE) reduces bufferbloat.

The first occurence on the Wayback Machine is from July 2021.

Focus on bufferbloat

This test is designed to determine the level of bufferbloat. This is clearly visible on the results page where the focus is on the bufferbloat grade.

When the Waveform (Butterbloat and Internet) speed test is completed you get a grade for the measured butterbloat (in this example the butterbloat grade is an A)

That the internet speed is also measured is a kind of by-catch. This test is purely aimed at determining the butterbloat degree.

Pros

This Waveform (Bufferbloat and Internet) speed test has the following pros:

  1. The Waveform (Bufferbloat and Internet) speed test is an original speed test
  2. A nice feature is that during the test, the actual phase is highlighted in the text

A nice detail is that the current phase of the test is highlighted in the text

Cons

This Waveform (Bufferbloat and Internet) speed test has the following cons:

  1. There is a relatively large variation in the measurements
  2. The test takes a long time
  3. The test requires a lot of data

When to use Waveform (Bufferbloat and Internet)

If you just want to know what your internet speed is, then use another speed test. Read our advice for a better speed test that suits your needs.

As stated earlier your home network is usually the bottleneck. Hence you might try this test to measure your bufferbloat.

How we tested

We have tested the Waveform (Bufferbloat and Internet) 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: 101.3 Mbps
  4. Clear indication of the current focus: yes
  5. Correct back button behavior: yes
  6. Flesch Reading Ease score of the privacy policy: 27.15
  7. Number of ACheckers known problems: 1
  8. Number of cookies: 30
  9. Number of measured features: 5
  10. Number of Wave errors: 1
  11. Observatory score: 50
  12. Tingtun score: 86.16
  13. Total data use of 3 measurements: 1424.82 MiBs
  14. Total time to complete 3 tests: 240 seconds