[toast0]

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.

[acdha]

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.