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Home / How-To / Small Business How-To
How-To
HOW TO TEST YOUR INTERNET SPEED FOR FREE
Are you getting the broadband speeds you're paying for? Simple tools can help
you find out
By Chris Martin
Reviews Editor, Tech Advisor AUG 12, 2022 11:29 am BST
Image: Shutterstock
If you want to check whether you’re getting the broadband speed that your
provider claims to offer, or you’re trying to find out whether it’s a poor Wi-FI
connection causing videos to buffer or games to lag, we know a number of free
ways to do it.
Often it can be hard to know if it’s your home Wi-Fi or your broadband that’s
slow. Plus, doing a ‘Wi-Fi speed test’ is not the same as checking your
broadband speed but there are plenty of apps (and people) which use the two
terms interchangeably.
If you try and test your internet speed over a weak or slow Wi-Fi connection,
you might not get a true figure as a low Wi-Fi speed can be the bottleneck. This
is actually a test of the whole connection from your device – a PC, laptop,
phone or tablet – to a server on the internet. So it is testing both your Wi-Fi
speed and broadband speed. Of course, you can test your mobile data speed if you
run the test on your phone with Wi-Fi disabled.
But what if you want to know for sure how fast your broadband connection is at
your router? Well, you’ve come to the right place as we’ll explain everything
you need to know.
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It’s worth knowing that internet speeds vary depending on many factors.
Sometimes, when you and all your housemates, family members or even neighbours
are streaming Netflix at the same time, things can slow to a crawl. Or, it could
be that a dodgy Wi-Fi connection is running slowly and making you think your
broadband provider is at fault.
If you use a VPN, that could be the cause of web pages loading slowly. Be sure
to disable any VPN before you run tests – unless you’re testing your VPN
provider’s speed, of course.
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FREE INTERNET SPEED TEST
The service we use to check broadband speeds is Speedtest.net. You can do this
in a web browser, or download the app for Android and iOS.
It will tell you – normally within a minute – how quick your connection is, but
make sure you’re standing close to your router if running the test on a device
connected via Wi-Fi. To eliminate the possibility of slow Wi-Fi, it’s best to
run the test using a laptop or PC connected directly to your router with an
Ethernet cable.
There are many others you can use including Fast.com,
broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk and broadbandgenie.co.uk.
It really depends upon how fast your broadband is: the fastest broadband in the
UK can deliver 1Gbps (like Virgin Media’s Gig1 plan), which will be faster than
most Wi-Fi routers can provide. But virtually all ISP-supplied routers will
offer Wi-Fi that’s faster than your broadband speed. Those that support Wi-Fi 5
should be able to handle 300-500Mbps at close range.
If you want to see how fast your home Wi-Fi performs, here’s how to test Wi-Fi
speed. Also, find out whether Wi-Fi 6E is worth it.
You should know that many broadband packages are asynchronous, which means they
offer different speeds for uploading and downloading. Download speeds are the
headline figures you hear about because they’re often much faster. Upload speeds
can be very slow – up to 90% slower than download speeds – which is why it can
take ages to upload a video to YouTube, for example, when it’s much faster to
download from YouTube.
Similarly, if you’re having trouble with Zoom calls where your own video stops
and starts, you should test your upload speed and remember that smart cameras
that record to the cloud will be using up some of your upload bandwidth.
Internet speed tests should tell you both your upload and download speeds.
They should also report your ‘ping’ in miliseconds, which is the latency of your
connection. This is important for real-time applications such as online gaming
and video calls. A lower number is better.
Note: The download and upload speeds will be reported in Mbps, which is Megabits
per second, not to be confused with Megabytes per second. To convert between the
two divide a speed in Megabits per second by 8 to get the Megabytes per second
figure.
You can also get apps for some speed checkers, including the ever-popular
Speedtest, for iOS and Android.
Chris Martin / Foundry
HOW TO TEST YOUR WI-FI SPEED
If your speed result is slower than you were expecting and you ran the test over
Wi-Fi, you can check your Wi-Fi speed separately to see if that’s the issue or
not. Finding an app to test Wi-Fi speed is difficult because a lot of broadband
testing apps call themselves “Wi-Fi speed test”.
However, there is an Android app called WiFi Speed Test Internet Speed by Zoltán
Pallagi which allows you to disable the internet part and just see how fast is
your local Wi-Fi. It isn’t the prettiest, but it does the job.
This only tests the ‘upload’ speed, which is the speed from your phone (or
tablet) to your router or whatever access point you’re connected to. Again, the
speed will be limited by the slowest device – your router might be the latest
model with Wi-Fi 6 support, but unless your phone also supports the same speed,
the result you see will be the speed of the slowest device.
Here we’ve tested with a Huawei P30 Pro (Wi-Fi 5) connecting to a Linksys Velop
tri-band mesh system. (Ignore the BT Hub SSID – this was cloned to the Velop
system to avoid having to reconfigure a whole load of devices with a new Wi-Fi
network.) The speed of 461Mbps is very good, and way faster than the 60Mbps
download speed we get from BT.
You can use this app in various places around your home to see how speeds vary
in different rooms, or even in the garden. It can be very helpful in knowing
where best to place your router or mesh Wi-Fi devices.
WHAT INTERNET SPEED DO I NEED FOR NETFLIX, ZOOM AND GAMING?
If the reason for testing your broadband speed is to see whether it’s good
enough for certain tasks, here are some recommended speeds:
* Standard definition video streaming 1.5Mbps download
* HD video streaming 5Mbps download
* 4K video streaming: 25Mbps download
* 8K video streaming: 50Mbps download (minimum – recommended is 100Mbps)
* Zoom / Teams video call: 4Mbps download / 3Mbps upload (for HD)
* Online gaming: <50ms desirable, <100ms usable. Above 150ms may be unusable
If you’re not happy with the speeds you’ve got from these testing tools, then
check out the best UK broadband services, best UK broadband deals, the best mesh
Wi-Fi systems and also learn how to reduce ping.
Plus, here are some great tips to speed up and improve your home Wi-Fi speeds.
AUTHOR: CHRIS MARTIN, REVIEWS EDITOR, TECH ADVISOR
Chris got his break as a reporter at infamous site The Inquirer and has been at
Tech Advisor for more than 12 years. With a BA degree in Music Technology, audio
is his specialism, but over the years he has reviewed all kinds of gadgets, from
smartwatches to mesh Wi-Fi to coffee machines.
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