Having trouble with slow Internet speeds? If your connection seems a lot slower than your provider's advertised download limits, it may be time to switch broadband providers.
But before you phone up fuming, demanding that your ISP to cancel your contract, you may want to check your Internet connection to confirm the speeds you're actually getting first and compare them to those of your neighbours'.
Our guide to the best tools to text your Internet speed offers you with five options to see how your broadband performs and how it compares to other suppliers in your area, helping you make a more educated decision.
Why you should test your broadband speed
If a sluggish internet connection isn't enough to convince you to perform a speed test, there's a variety of other reasons you may want to check its actual speed.
If your ISP has promised you a certain speed, you'll want to check that's actually what you're getting (or at least if it's close enough to the advertised speed). It's important to note that all ISPs describe their limits as "up to" because the actual speeds you'll get will depend on a range of factors, such as how far you are from the exchange, the infrastructure to your home (are the cables in good condition) and of course the equipment you have in your home, such as the router and the devices you're connecting to the internet.
You may want to see whether your ISP is throttling your data at certain times of the day. The majority of broadband suppliers have peak and off-peak speeds and so at peak times (evening and weekends), they'll reduce speeds so they can ensure no one hogs the bandwidth.
If you want to compare your speeds other your friends or neighbours, it's another good reason to test how fast your broadband is running.
The final reason for testing your broadband speed is to help companies improve their services in certain areas.
Most of the tools detailed below create their own reports and league tables to compare the major broadband providers and this data is made available to the ISPs themselves as well as Ofcom to give an overview of the UK's broadband market. This data can also be used by the general public to help them compare their current provider against others and of their performance isn't as good as other sin the area, there's a good reason to switch broadband supplier.
Read next: Ofcom - Broadband buyers to get speed guarantees or be free to leave
How to get the most accurate results
There are plenty of things that can sabotage getting the most accurate speed test results, whichever tool you use to try and work out whether your connection is performing as well as your ISP says it should.
If you want to get the most accurate results of your internet connection’s speed and reliability, make sure any apps that use significant bandwidth aren’t running. You generally want to avoid those that are pinging frequently to the internet checking for changes, such as Google Drive, Dropbox, email etc.
All of these types of apps are constantly checking for any changes, meaning they use a lot of bandwidth all the time. Plus, if the app finds something’s changed, it'll start to re-sync with your account, which could consume bandwidth too
Also, avoid downloading anything - even software updates - while you're performing the test to ensure nothing could hog the connection. Streaming or downloading media such as music, TV shows or films is also a big no-no.
The same goes for non-connected apps. Make sure your computer isn’t doing anything memory-intensive, such as running a virus scan or processing video. A slow computer could also affect how accurate your results are. Close all apps apart from the browser you’re using to run the test.
Aside from your computer, make sure no one else on the network is using their computer, a connected TV, NAS or mobile over Wi-Fi or ethernet for the same reasons detailed above.
Proxies can also interrupt an internet connection, so switch these off as well as VPNs or compression engines, which can commonly mask any connection issues.
Finally, make sure you run the test more than once to find an average speed. If you want a really accurate average speed, try re-performing the test at different times throughout the day and work out the mean to see just how well (or badly) your broadband connection is performing. It may be that network throttling has a detrimental affect on your connection and if this is the case, it could be wise to choose a broadband provider that doesn’t restrict broadband speeds at different times of the day.
Speedtest.net
Speedtest.net is perhaps the most well-known broadband speed testing tool around.
It was developed by Ookla and has been around for years (since 2006, to be precise). Up until August 2017, more than 10 billion speed tests had been completed.
Speedtest.net picks five nearby servers (out of a list of more than 1,000) to measure the ping, download speed and upload speeds over TCP with with an HTTP fallback. It determines your location from your IP address as soon as you land on the site
Ping works by measuring the time it takes for the server to respond to a request from the user’s ISP. It sends a small message to the server, high then responds. This is measured in milliseconds, repeating the test to achieve an average. Download speeds are tested by the client setting up multiple connections with the server over port 8080. It requests chunks of data, which the server then sends back and the time it takes to download is tested. It will continue requesting these chunks of data while the test is completed, adjusting the chunk size and buffer rate to establish the most efficient network connection. Upload speed is calculated in the same way, but in reverse.HTTP Legacy Fallback Testing works slightly differently to TCP testing while testing download and upload speeds. It downloads small binary files to work out the approximate speed and then the most suitable packet to work out the connection speed. Samples are received at up to 30 times a second and then split into 20 slices. The fastest two slices are removed, as are the bottom two and then the rest combined to work out the average speed.
After you've performed your speed test, you can then input details about your ISP and how much you pay for your connection, which Ookla then uses to build a profile of all ISPs. The company has been compiling this data annually since 2016, pitting each broadband provider against each other and creating a league table of the best performing ISPs across the globe.
Bandwidth Place
In 2002, BandwidthPlace.com launched a free, easy-to-use speed test for global Internet users. It’s been running on HTML5 since 2013, meaning it works seamlessly on mobiles as well as desktops without having to download an app (as is the case with Speedtest.net, for example).
Bandwidth Place will automatically connect to a server that responds with the fastest ping, or you can manually choose one of the around 20 that are available, and then save and share your results.
You can't save results, although if you use the same IP address to perform multiple tests, you are able to view the, but otherwise, you'll manually have to note down the speed test results at different times of the day to get an average or to see if your provider is throttling your speed at peak times, for example.
Unlike some of the other broadband speed testing tools on this list, Broadband Place doesn't collate the information it collects into any kind of league table or comparison service - it exists purely to show you how fast your broadband speed is.
It's a little disappointing that you can't use the service to compare against your neighbours, but one benefit to this tool is that it will work whatever device you're using, making it useful for testing your mobile network’s speed as well as home broadband supplier.
SpeedOf.me
SpeedOf.me directly uploads and downloads files from your server to test the download and upload rate of your internet connection, like all the broadband speed testing tools mentioned here.
However, it works in a slightly different way. Using one of its 88 "super servers", it uses a CDN to serve files, which your network will need to download. The tool first downloads a 128KB file and if that takes less than eight seconds to download, it starts downloading a slightly larger packet. The download sizes increase gradually (128 KB, 256 KB, 512 KB, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 and 128 MB), as long as the download completes within eight seconds. As soon as it takes longer than that, the tests will stop and it will use the first failed download as the benchmark.
Following the download test, the same principles will be applied to uploads, although the sample sizes are much smaller than those in the first test.
The company's servers are located around the world, near exchange points, in order to get the most accurate results. The one closest to your location will be identified using CDN tech to make sure the tests run without a hiccup, but give the most 'real-life' results.
The company explained that this method is exactly the same method your web browser uses to download pages and because it doesn't use "chunks" and take an average reading like some of the other tools for testing your broadband speed, neither does it make any adjustments.
As is the case across the board, SpeedOf.Me recommends you switch off any proxy server or firewall to ensure the results are the most accurate they can possibly be.
TestMy.net
TestMy.net's broadband speed test has been around since 1996, also testing any problems with your connection, browser and operating system - not just whether your ISP isn’t performing as well as it should. This offers much more information than some of the others around and the company thinks it makes its test more reliable than others.
TestMy.net's tool uses dedicated, centralised servers based in North America, Asia, Australia, and Europe, each with multiple gigabit uplinks and multi-homed connectivity to over 25 Tier1 bandwidth providers. This means whether your ISP uses fibre, copper cable, satellite, DSL, mobile network or any other method to get your connection into your home, it’s supported by this particular broadband speed testing tool.
It uses HTML5 and PHP to uncover your speed, rather than Flash or Java, meaning it works across devices and doesn’t require you to make any changes in your browser (such as switching on Java).
TestMy.net's broadband speed testing tool has two options: either the auto test, which downloads randomly generated data to the browser, calculating how long it takes to download and a manual test, which allows the user to select what size file they’d like to use to perform their speed test. These range up to 200MB for the download bandwidth test and 100MB for the upload test. Both types of test always use random files, which prevents data caching and gives the most accurate results.
You can keep tabs on all your past results in a personal score database, where you can create graphs, work out averages (for example, if you get different results at different times in the day) and compare your speed against other cities, countries, users and providers.
uSwitch
uSwitch's broadband speed test has been designed to test your broadband speed and compare it against others in the same area to help people make a decision about whether to switch broadband providers.
You'll need to enter some details about your property, such as your postcode and your current supplier, plus whether it’s a home or business package. uSwitch will also ask you to rate your supplier based upon your experiences.
When the test starts, it'll download test packet of data to gain a rough estimate of the broadband speed and then it'll chose a larger download for the real test. On slow connections, this may only be 2MB, for example, but on a faster fibre connection, it will realise the broadband is capable of downloading a much larger - say 10MB file.
At this point, it downloads multiple packets of data over an HTTP POST connection at the same time, essentially bombarding a broadband connection and offering a more accurate representation of how your provider is performing.
uSwitch's test then works out the upload speed in Mbps, based upon how long it took the broadband connection to download the packets of data concurrently.
It works across broadband types, from slow ADSL to very fast fibre-optic connections up to 100Mbps (in some cases, it can even detect higher speeds than that) and will even show how being further from the exchange can affect your broadband speed if your postcode is in the company’s database.
