Testing Your Home Internet Connection

Ever wondered how fast your internet speed is at home? Sure, you can use speed test web sites, but do you know how much your speed varies depending on what sites you visit?

For instance, did you know that going to a site on the east coast from your home on the west coast can slow down your speed by more than 50%?


I have Comcast for my home service, and my plan offers up to 75 megabits per second, which is over 18 times faster than what I get at work (more on that later). The tests that ran over last night revealed that when my connection went to a west coast server, I got as high as 92 megabits per second, but when it went to an east coast server, my speed dropped to around 39 megabits per second. Moreover, the difference in round trip time (latency), is huge. West coast latency averaged 17 milliseconds, while east coast latency was in the mid-80s. Generally speaking, if your latency is below 100 milliseconds, your internet service can support real-time streaming services (assuming other factor such as packet loss and jitter are within range).

As you can tell from the DIY-looking box in the image above, we're still alpha testing the home measurement device, and we hope to have production versions available for volunteers by 2Q 2018.

Here's a summary of my results: