How fast is your internet, really?
Press the button to measure your connection, then we’ll translate the numbers: how many shows you can stream, whether your video calls will hold up, and why it slows down when the whole family is online.
The test
It takes about 20 to 40 seconds. For the fairest result, pause any downloads or streaming in the house first.
What the numbers mean
Download is how fast things reach you: shows, web pages, photos. It’s the number internet plans advertise, in Mbps (megabits per second: how many million bits of data arrive each second). Upload is how fast you send: your face on a video call, a backup of your photos. Most home plans upload much slower than they download.
Response time (techies say “latency” or “ping”) is how long one tiny message takes to get to the server and back, in milliseconds. Speed is how wide the road is; response time is how long the drive takes. A wide road doesn’t help a video call if every word takes a quarter of a second to arrive.
We measure response time twice: when the line is quiet, and while it’s busy downloading and uploading. If the second is much bigger, big transfers are cutting in line ahead of your call, usually in your router or modem.
Testing on Wi-Fi? Then you’re measuring your Wi-Fi too. Try once next to the router, or with a cable, and compare.
Why Wi-Fi results differ from cable
Your internet plan delivers its speed to the box in your home. Wi-Fi then carries it the last few metres through the air, and walls, distance, the microwave and your neighbours’ networks all take a bite. A cable skips that step, so it shows what you’re really paying for. More on that in full Wi-Fi bars, so why is nothing loading?
This test measures the trip to Cloudflare’s nearest server. Your provider’s own test may measure a shorter trip inside its own network, so its number can look better than what you get from the rest of the internet.
Sources
- Cloudflare: speedtest (open-source measurement engine) (github.com)
The engine behind speed.cloudflare.com, measuring download, upload and response time against Cloudflare’s network from your browser.
- Netflix Help Center: Internet connection speed recommendations (help.netflix.com)
3 Mbps or more for HD, 5 Mbps for full HD and 15 Mbps for 4K, per stream.
- Zoom Support: bandwidth requirements (support.zoom.com)
Group video calls need 2.6 Mbps up and 1.8 Mbps down for 720p, and 3.8 Mbps up and 3.0 Mbps down for 1080p.
The questions behind it
- Full Wi-Fi bars, so why is nothing loading?
Full bars, and the movie still won't start? Your Wi-Fi bars only measure the last few steps of the trip. Here's how to find where it's really broken.
- Why does turning it off and on again actually work?
Laptop frozen two minutes before a meeting? Restart it. Here's why that fixes so much, why Restart beats Shut down on Windows, and what a restart can't fix.
More on YouTube
Dan and Liz answer one everyday tech question at a time, most of them in under a minute.