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A small discrepancy?

Posted: Wed Jun 09, 2021 7:58 pm
by sergneri
I just took the survey for Sonoma County internet speeds as requested in an email from the City of Petaluma.
The results for my test were:
Test Server San Francisco Bay Area, US
Download 407.23 Mb/s
Upload 325.08 Mb/s
Latency 3 ms
Retransmission 0.04%

Using the same computer but but member tools, the SONIC speed test returned this:
Sonic.net, Inc. San Jose, CA
Test results
Ping 3 ms Jitter 4ms
Download 858.1 Mbps
Upload 794.5 Mbps

That is a 50% difference. Is this due to the speed test SONIC provides running all on FIBER? Or is there another reason one would expect this difference?

Thanks!

Edit - here is the URL for the SONOMA COUNTY test: http://sonomaedb.org/Current-Projects/B ... peed-Test/

Re: A small discrepancy?

Posted: Thu Jun 10, 2021 9:07 am
by brandonc
Speedtests aren't necessarily displaying your internet's actual speed, but rather the connection speed between you a given server at that current moment. It is definitely good for getting an estimation of your current connection speeds, but it can be bottlenecked by the speedtest's server.

It could be due to heavy traffic to that specific server during that time or possibly just an unoptimized website consuming more data than needed.

If you receive a strange speedtest result on any website, it's best to try re-testing once more and make sure that it wasn't a misleading result. If you continue to receive strange results repeatedly, then it's best to try checking a few different speedtest websites and averaging the results together.

Re: A small discrepancy?

Posted: Thu Jun 10, 2021 11:11 am
by sergneri
Thanks for the reply - they don't provide an destination IP for traceroute but I did execute it again a few moments ago and got this result:
Test Server San Francisco Bay Area, US
Download 912.16 Mb/s
Upload 516.79 Mb/s
Latency 4 ms
Retransmission 0.01%

which is more in line with my expectations. The internet is a large space.

Re: A small discrepancy?

Posted: Wed Jul 07, 2021 8:45 pm
by julianoster
It's funny by the way, living in SF with native Sonic fiber, I regularly get better bandwidth to the Fastmetrics speedtest.net servers than to the Sonic ones (appears to be the same as linked from Member Tools).

Right now for example, I get 200-300Mbps down and over 300Mbps up to Fastmetrics (but over WiFi, so it probably caps out because of my setup here), and only 180Mbps down and 140MBps up (so this time reversed, also) to Sonic.

I guess my connection to the Sonic speedtest server is just not the best. (Something I have no real reason to complain about.)