Satellite broadband speed test - fast.com
We live in a rural area and recently got satellite broadband installed. We were told that we could expect speeds of between 21 Mbps and 30 Mbps. When we tested our connection after installation, using fast.com, we were getting speeds of ~1 Mbps. The satellite broadband company have told us that fast.com does not accurately reflect download speeds for satellite broadband due to latency and that we should use their preferred speed testing site speedprobe.skylogicnet.com.
I have access to a server via work and I have ran a manual test where I generate a file with 25M random bytes, head -c 25000000 </dev/urandom >random_file, and download it using curl curl -o random_file.txt sftp://server/path/to/random_file. I used the time to download this file as a separate independent random test i.e. speed in Mbps = 200 / time taken in seconds.
I tested using fast.com, speedprobe.skylogicnet.com and my manual test three times in a row at approximately 10 minute intervals and I got the following results for the download speed in Mbps:
+---------+----------+----------+--------+
| | skylogic | fast.com | manual |
+---------+----------+----------+--------+
| test 1 | 12.2 | 2.2 | 1.7 |
+---------+----------+----------+--------+
| test 2 | 17.3 | 1.4 | 1.5 |
+---------+----------+----------+--------+
| test 3 | 8.4 | 1.0 | 1.7 |
+---------+----------+----------+--------+
| average | 12.6 | 1.5 | 1.6 |
+---------+----------+----------+--------+I should say that results from testmy.net and speedtest.net are more in line with the results from speedprobe.skylogicnet.com i.e. download speeds jump between 8 Mbps and 20 Mbps.
I have two questions that I hope somebody could help me with:
- Is fast.com really not suitable for testing satellite broadband speeds? If so, is there a simple explanation why it cannot be used but speedprobe.skylogicnet.com, testmy.net and speedtest.net can be used.
- My manual test and fast.com agree roughly i.e. download speed of ~1.5 Mbps. Why is there such a deviation between these results and those of the speedprobe.skylogicnet.com test? If I believe the speedprobe.skylogicnet.com results, my random file should be downloading in order of 16 secs and not taking order of 2 mins?
I would really appreciate any thoughts or pointers that could help me make sense of these results.
2 Reset to default
