Internet or Wi-Fi Speed Test: Get it 100% Right Today

Internet or Wi-Fi Speed Test: Get it 100% Right Today

At one point or another, you might have wondered how to do a proper Wi-Fi speed test or the right way to figure out how fast your Internet is.

In this post, you’ll find the answer to that question: the absolute speeds of your connections. Take absolute with a big grain of salt, though, since these speeds vary greatly.

Before we continue, ensure you understand that Wi-Fi and the Internet are two different things.

Dong’s note: I first published this post on December 19, 2018, and last updated it on November 9, 2022, to include additional relevant information.

Internet or Wi-Fi Speed Test: Netgear CM600 Cable Modem
Internet or Wi-Fi Speed Test: Figuring out those numbers can be challenging.

Why you should care about your Internet speed

It’s generally helpful to know how fast your Internet is. Faster always seems better, but you only need certain speed grades to do specific tasks.

Take video streaming — one of the most bandwidth-taxing online activities — for example; you’ll generally need a minimum download speed of:

  • 3 Megabits per second for DVD quality.
  • 5Mbps for HD quality.
  • 25Mbps for Blu-ray (4K) quality.
  • 80Mbps for 8K video.

Keep in mind that this is the speed required by a single stream. If you have more than one person streaming simultaneously, you generally need to multiply those numbers with the concurrent clients to determine the necessary real-time bandwidth.

Also, there are a lot more online applications than streaming. Some of these applications — such as automatic updates — even occur within a connected device without you getting involved.

So yes, again, faster Internet is always better. But there’s more than the download speed on the Internet.

Internet connection explained

When testing an Internet connection, you’ll get two main numbers, download and upload — sometimes they are called downlink and uplink. And you might also see a few other values, including ping, jitter, and package loss.

Following is the breakdown of what they mean.

Internet speed: Upload vs download

Download speed represents how fast you can pull things from outside your local network.

That said, streaming a movie, surfing a website, downloading a file, getting an email, etc., use the download pipe.

Upload represents the speed of the opposite direction.

Things like sending an email, posting a photo or comment to Facebook, saving a file to Google Drive, using cloud-recording/smart devices, etc., use the upload pipe.

While we use more of the download pipe, data transmission — delivered in small portions called packets — needs both directions to work. That’s because your computer uses the upload pipe to confirm to the remote server that it has received a packet and is ready for the next one.

That said, when the upload pipe is clogged up, you can’t download anything.

In a Cable broadband connection, the download speed tends to be much faster than the upload speed. But you might get the same rate for both directions with a Fiber-optic service.

Still, suppose somebody is seeding a torrent file or uploading a large amount of information without limiting the upload speed for the task. In that case, others might not be able to download anything. Keep that in mind.

Packet loss

As the name suggests, packet loss happens when a packet of data is either not received or partially received.

Most of the time, this results from a bad physical connection or incompatible MTU settings. In this case, the packet will be resent. Packet loss shouldn’t be higher than 1 percent.

Lag (or latency): Ping vs jitter

Both ping and jitter relate to the delay in a connection, but they are slightly different.

Ping is the fixed latency or lag at a given time — in a speed test, it’s generally measured at the beginning. It’s the amount of time, shown in milliseconds, needed for a data packet from one party to reach another or vice versa.

The shorter your ping is, the better your Internet connection is for applications that require real-time interaction, such as Wi-Fi calling or online gaming. Generally, a ping of 15ms or shorter is considered excellent.

Jitter, often called Packet Delay Variation (PDV) or ping variations, measures ping values over time — the entire test.

In other words, if every packet takes the exact amount of time — no matter how long — to arrive at the destination, then there’s no jitter.

The higher the jitter value, the more likely a packet loss will occur. The jitter value should be below 30ms and is generally below 10ms.

How to do a real Internet speed test

There are many speed testing websites, such as Speedof.me, Fast.com, or Speedtest.net, for you to choose from. But don’t get too obsessed about which to use. They all use the same test methodology.

And no matter which you use, the results will vary due to the server’s location (and Internet speed). So pick one that’s best for your location, and in that sense, Speedtest.net is excellent — it’s ubiquitously available with many servers of different speed grades.

Since you’re on this page, do a quick test right now.





⏱️ Dong Knows Tech custom Speed Test transfers data between your device and an Ookla test server

So how fast is it? Totally fast, and you’re happy with it? Good for you! You can move on now. But if it’s not what you expected, keep in mind that chances are it’s not your correct Internet speed anyway.

Let me explain. When you did the test, there might have been other devices in the network, also using part of the connection’s bandwidth.

If you have an ultra-high-speed broadband plan, the local Wi-Fi or your computer’s wired connection might not be fast enough to deliver the Internet bandwidth fully.

That said, to find out the real speed of your broadband connection, you must prepare before the testing.

Netgear CM600 Cable Modem 3
Your Internet speed is generally correct at the modem or any similar terminal device at your home’s broadband drop.

What you need to do a real Internet speed test

To test your broadband connection, you need to do that at the source, using devices that are not the bottleneck.

Specifically, here are what you need:

  • A test computer with a network port: A Gigabit port is usually OK, but if you want to test a full Gigabit, Gig+, or faster broadband connection, a Multi-Gig-capable (2.5Gbps, 5Gbps, 10Gbps) computer is a must. That means, in most cases, you need a desktop with a 10Gbps PCIe internal adapter or a Thunderbolt laptop with a 10Gbps external adapter.
  • CAT6a or higher grade cables: Generally, CAT5e cable will work but only for Gigabit or slower connections. While this cable grade can deliver up to 10Gbps, it’s not as consistent as CAT6a or higher.
  • (Optional) a router capable of Multi-Gig on both WAN and LAN sides: This applies only if you want to test the connection via the router. In this case, make sure you turn any bandwidth-related features of the router, such as QoS, off. If you have a sub-Gigabit broadband connection, a Gigabit router will do.

After that, here’s how to connect the devices for the test:

  • Connect the test machine directly to the Internet terminal device, a modem, a gateway, or a Fiber ONT, using a network cable. The objective is to remove all middle devices, like a slow switch or router, that can be the bottleneck.
  • (Optional) If you use a router, make sure you connect its fastest ports for both the WAN (the terminal device) and the LAN side (your test computer.)
  • Check to ensure the computer is the only device using the broadband connection during the test. For example, if the Internet source is a gateway, make sure you disconnect all other devices from it (unplug all other network cables and turn off its Wi-Fi.)

And that’s it! Now on the test computer, do a few speed tests as you did earlier. The number you get is your real Internet speed.

By the way, you’ll likely still get a different result each time you do a test. That’s just how the Internet is. Feel free to use the highest number as your broadband score.

Now, if it’s still significantly lower than your broadband plan, it’s time to call the provider to complain.

Again this complicated real test is to make sure you get what the ISP promises you. Generally, you only need to do a random test on any device to determine the connection speed at any given time, and if it’s fast enough, there’s no need to do anything else.

How to test a router’s Wi-Fi speed test

There are many Wi-Fi speed test apps. None of these are accurate for a couple of reasons. Generally, it’s not always the best idea to use an app to test Wi-Fi speeds.

First, mobile devices almost always optimize their Wi-Fi adapter for power consumption and not performance to conserve battery life. That’s because the former is way more important in real-world usage.

Second, none of these apps can move data between itself and another to replicate what users do in real life. They are all synthetic.

That said, avoid using speed test apps if you want to know how fast your local Wi-Fi speed really is. And it would be best if you didn’t use Internet speed test apps to test the local Wi-Fi speed, either. A router’s Wi-Fi speed is likely much faster than the speed of a broadband connection.

And even when you have ultra-fast Internet, many variations in the world wide web can adversely affect broadband speeds. As a result, it’s rarely accurate, if at all, to use the Internet to test your Wi-Fi’s throughputs.

Using a phone to do a speed test via an app is OK.

But in this case, chances are the result is not 100% indicative of your Wi-Fi or broadband speed. Instead, it’s the speed of the phone’s Wi-Fi capability or its Internet at the time. And that can be helpful (enough) information.

That said, if your Internet or the Wi-Fi connection is faster than a particular speed grade, say 500Mbps, and you want to figure out the actual speed, you need to test it via a real computer with the fastest network and Wi-Fi adapter to make sure.

The best way to determine a router’s Wi-Fi speed is to copy data from one computer (a server) to another (a Wi-Fi client) within the local network, using a single wired-to-wireless connection.

If you use multiple Wi-Fi clients for the testing, the router’s Wi-Fi bandwidth is shared; therefore, you can’t determine how fast its Wi-Fi can genuinely be. That’s not to mention Wi-Fi software drivers tend to be optimized for battery life and therefore favor download over upload.

And that means, again, you need to do some preparation.

What you need to do a real Wi-Fi speed test

In my experience, the real-world speed of Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac), even at its best, has never surpassed the sustained rate of a wired Gigabit connection. But Wi-Fi 6, and especially Wi-Fi 6E, can be significantly faster.

In any case, keep this in mind: The connection speed between a pair of network devices is at the mercy of the lowest party involved. You can read more about that in this post about network basics, but the gist is the rate you see is that of the bottleneck device.

That said, these are what you need to test a device’s Wi-Fi speed:

  1. A computer that plays the server’s role and hosts the test data. This computer must have a Gigabit network port — or a 10 Gigabit Ethernet port if you intend to test a Wi-Fi 6 router — and use a solid-state drive as its storage. Connect this computer to the fastest LAN port of the Wi-Fi router you want to test. (If the router doesn’t support Gigabit, you can forget about it. It’s already too slow, anyway). Now on this server computer, share the folder that contains the test data so that it’s accessible to other computers that connect to the same router.
  2. A second computer — be it a laptop or a desktop — to play the Wi-Fi client’s role. This computer must have the highest-end (fastest possible) Wi-Fi adapter of at least the same speed grate as the router. This computer should also use a solid-state drive as its storage. Connect this computer to the Wi-Fi network of the router. Make sure you separate the bands when possible, be it 2.4GHz, 5GHz, or 6GHz, into different networks to know which band is being tested.

And that’s it! Now from the second computer (the Wi-Fi client), browse for the shared folder on the server and copy the data. Time how long that process takes, do some simple math with the amount of data involved, and you’ll figure out how fast the connection is.

For example, if the data you copy is 2000 megabytes and the copy process takes 30 seconds, the speed is 66.7 megabytes per second or 533.6 Mbps.

You can move the Wi-Fi client around to find out how the distances — between the router and the client — affect the Wi-Fi speed.

Similar to Internet speed, the Wi-Fi speed also tends to fluctuate. That said, feel free to pick the highest number of the same location as your router’s speed.

The takeaway

Again, unless you need to find out the actual speed of a Wi-Fi broadcaster or your broadband, for one reason or another, there’s no need to work very hard at it. Most of the time, a quick speed test is enough.

Ultimately, we only need the connection to be as fast as an application requires. Above that, the extra bandwidth will not amount to anything meaningful.

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