Giganews Speed Test

[quandam]

Have found this speed test to be one of the most accurate around.

http://www.giganews.com/performance.html

Your views please!

[Nerval]

I'm interested to hear how you know that it is accurate.

[quandam]

I'm interested to hear how you know that it is accurate.

Good morning Nerval !

Perhaps I should have added the words 'and quickest' (to offer the result)  to my original post of 'one of the most accurate'.

I compared the giganews speed test with the BT Test (when working of course!) / Speedtest.net / Namesco / ADSLguide / ZDnet plus a couple of others  all within a 15 minute time frame and within an acceptable margin  (for me) an 'average' speed reading was achieved. Apart from the ZDnet test, which is pretty quick the giganews test (X2) agreed with all the other tests but offered the information in a fraction of the time from accessing the site to actually getting the reading.

I appreciate that you will more than likely say that none of the above tests could be described as accurate and you would  probably be right in that assumption but that was the information I used.

By the way, many thanks for the pre-fetching information and advice.

[Bill]

All speed tests are accurate unless the programmer is an idiot- all they have to do is count the bytes transferred and divide by how long it took.

So the result is perfectly accurate at the time the test was performed.

How representative it is of the performance you can expect to get at any other time is another matter entirely....

[Lance]

All speed tests are accurate unless ....

the server is so busy it can't provide information at the maximum speed your line can support!!

[Bill]

the server is so busy it can't provide information at the maximum speed your line can support!!

No, the speed test is still accurate. The speed you will get at any time depends not only on your line speed, but what the congestion is like all the way from your PC's RJ45 to the hard drive containing the data you want to download.

That's true whether it's speed test data, a movie, a linux distro or an email...

[Nerval]

I'm staying out of this, but watch the discussion with interest.