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by acdha 1678 days ago
I think the key part is needing that understanding that it tells you how fast Netflix will perform, which is likely not the same as general internet performance. That can be useful to compare with tools like https://speed.cloudflare.com/ to see how your ISP's peering holds up but it's definitely an important nuance.
2 comments
dylan604 1678 days ago
Hmmm, I hadn't visited Fast.com in some time. Just visited, and it quite clearly states "Your Internet Speed" and the title of the page visible in the tab is "Internet Speed Test". I can't imagine why people would be consfused. /s

I clicked around to see if they defined it in more detail about specifically testing Netflix CDN vs general internet activity, but I found not such information. However, this has always been understood on my part to be the case. Maybe because of where I was working when it first came on scene? I clearly didn't get that information from their website.

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minhazm 1678 days ago
This is true of most internet speed tests though. Even speedtest.net uses their own servers. If you're measuring for speed you just need to be sure that the server has higher bandwidth available than your ISP.

If you're looking for a generic internet connectivity test then you'll need to test a few dozen sites at least, with diversity in which CDN's they're using and so on.

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toast0 1678 days ago
Just like the Netflix/fast.com tests networking speed to Netflix, the cloudflare test is for networking speed to cloudflare.

Neither of those give you a general internet performance indicator. You'd need to run many tests to really know, and it depends on your ISPs network, transit and peering, most of which is pretty opaque.

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acdha 1678 days ago
Yes but the difference I had in mind is that Cloudflare is generally available (i.e. I can't host my website on OpenConnect) and they don't seem to push as far into local deployments. I've never seen a Cloudflare trace route stay entirely on my ISP's network whereas that's usually the case for Netflix.

Now, that might not be faster — my local Cloudflare endpoint appears to be ~16ms vs ~20ms for my ISP's Netflix deployment but it can tell you whether they're routinely underprovisioning peering capacity even if it doesn't give you as much data as a distributed test would.

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