If they're marginally competent the ISP is QoS'ing all traffic to and from the servers used for SpeedTest. And if you're doing it over a VPN you need to worry about VPN latency and bandwidth limits, so that method won't really work out.
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FCC Asks Americans to Use FCC Speed Test App to Measure U.S. Broadband Availability
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You can't rely on it for a latency, but it's easy to find a VPN (or make your own elsewhere) with more bandwidth than the connection you're testing. Probably easier to run your own file transfer test to somewhere, but there's value in running the exact same test as the website.
I remember the 90's well and the promises of broadband, "just around the corner." An ATT tech, more than ten years ago, told me that fiber from that scam is in the ground along a road within a mile of my rural house, and that ATT had the capability to provide broadband over the last mile of copper. To this day, ATT has opted to never use it. Why would they when they can sell me a crappy cellular plan with strictly metered data, that requires no maintenance or labor to keep service going.
meanwhile you're posting about this on a forum with a picture of your face (or someone else's which would just be rude), likely carry a facebook account, i'm assuming also a driver's license, passport, and of course a social security number that you have used for credit checks, job applications for payroll processing and tax information, etc.
but yeah, the straw that's breaking the camel's back on "privacy" is downloading an app so the FCC can have the notion of just how garbage american internet access is.
Last house I lived in. AT&T had signs up all over my neighborhood for months that they were running fiber optic in my neighborhood. The techs were out running wires all throughout the streets. Saw them out around every day for a couple months. Working busily and laying cables underground. They even worked on the box out in front of my house and neighbors houses. I asked the tech if this was going to be fiber to the curb or to the door. He said to the door.
I called AT&T about the service. They said it wasn't available in my area. Nothing I could say could convince them that they just ran fiber optics throughout my neighborhood. Even a year later. My neighborhood was still not listed as available for U-Verse nor any other fiber optic service. All that was offered was Cable and DSL.
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Call or go to your local store and file an F-case ticket. They may still be working on getting your neighborhood’s PFP online. But if only your address is showing up unserviceable, then that will prompt them to investigate and update the serviceability in their system.
Just like we have FIOS at both ends of our street and do you think they'd bring it down and into the neighborhood? NOOoooooo they say there's not a big enough demand. Hmmmm over 300 new customers is not enough? My cellular service is faster most of the time.
As I said. Last house I lived at.
It's not an issue at my current house. Where I have gigabit fiber up/down. Thanks anyways.
They're likely using the same server for everyone, which is the only way this almost becomes useful. The biggest problem I see with this is that your ISP can be providing gig internet, but if you're still on a Linksys WRT54G, you'll be seen as having terrible internet. This would be a lot more useful on a wired connection as cables made 15 years ago still likely provide 1 Gb internet at least.
Not sure I’ll bother. I don’t have an M1 Mac and my Wifi maxes out at about 500/500 d/u so it’s a pretty inaccurate representation of my actual Google Fiber speeds.
Well, several thoughts on all of this.
First? Yeah, I think speedtest benchmarks do work a bit more accurately as installed apps, vs web-based ones. That's why many of the popular sites offer an optional app you can download/install. If you're doing the whole speed test via the web, they're typically running some client-side code like Java, Javascript (used to be Flash plug-ins for some of them), etc. Those "web app" programming languages aren't optimized for speed as well as native code written in something like C++ would be. So especially for a faster broadband connection, they may not really track it as accurately.
Second? I agree that this isn't really going to get the FCC a complete picture of the broadband situation across America. People most likely to find out this is a thing and bother to download and run their app are the more "tech savvy" to begin with. That means, you're polling results from a community that already had motivation to relocate to areas offering decent Internet options.
My other big concern about all of this is that the FCC is just acting from the flawed premise of government leaders that broadband issues can be solved by throwing more money at the providers. Historically, we've seen these initiatives result in providers doing the bare minimum to qualify for chunks of the Federal funding, and then they stop rolling out the services. (Look at Verizon FiOS for a great example of this. Great fiber broadband service, but was almost surgically deployed to *just* enough communities in the Northeastern USA so they got paid. Then, they stopped the roll-out and continued running TV ads for years to "Get FiOS!" in markets where nobody could even do that. And to cap it off? They put the whole thing up for sale, wanting to unload it in favor of a focus on their cellular services.)
I know that feeling. Even though the hardware is there, it won't be available in my neighborhood till 2022.
Go figure.
But you can believe I am getting the mail/email/calls about signing up!
I just checked. Just to see if my former house has it yet. It's just the garbage U-Verse fiber to copper with a 25 mbps max. This is six or seven years later. I guess someone goofed the paperwork and no one at AT&T knows they upgraded the cabling there. That or they don't want to run trenches through everyones yards to their houses.
Glad I moved. The funny thing is. In my current house they ran fiber through my neighborhood. Then started running fiber optic straight to the houses right away. No, delays. Not even waiting till they ran lines around the whole neighborhood. I think I had fiber optic lines within a month of them laying the first cables in the neighborhood.
Most areas are fiber, if you have any major cable internet provider. The only areas where their network isn't fiber is from the node (servers a block or two of houses) to the house. Everything else is fiber and has been for 15+ years.
Source: Worked for Time Warner Cable and Comcast in their NOC and head end, working with Design (the folks who pick where fiber/copper is used in the network).
I use a Nighthawk RAX200... I have plenty of bandwidth, it's AX 11000, tri-band, and you'd need a modern modem like this to serve gigabit internet anyway. One from 15 years ago wouldn't be able to do it, most WAN ports prior to a few years ago cap at 400 mbps, the 1 gig LAN ports of old are for just that... LAN.
They used the word “whilst” in the terms. I’ve never known an American to do that.