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Comment by zw123456 | Hacker News Reader

Agree. It's funny how people I know who are "non-tech" intuitively understand that of course speed-tests are rigged, but tech people somehow think that the same place that allows Facebook pages that say that the jews have space lasers, that same place somehow is completely honest about speed tests. I am just pointing out, fake world is fake world. Just because it's says Mbps does not exempt it from fakeness. Fake is as fake does.

Just interesting that people who are smart enough to understand other fake things on the internet (that maybe some people not as smart as you are not understanding). But when it is some ISP tricking you, all of a sudden, everyone is up in arms about it.

It's interesting.

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Well I'm a techie, for sure when it comes to networking, and on neither our current ISP nor our previous ISP did speedtests ever report a different value than what file transfers/bandwidth monitoring showed.

For that matter, I've never been able to find (and I've checked) that any particular site or connection type was actually given priority and more bandwidth. When the connection is slow, it's equally slow everywhere. When fast, equally fast everywhere.

Also I get the feeling that some people think the speedtest sites themselves are giving fake numbers. Why? What would they gain from that? And why have I never ran across this, despite using many speedtest sites on multiple ISPs?

For what it's worth, a popular speed test site could gain kickbacks from ISPs who want their customers to see "correct" number.

However, the deal is mostly not about speed test sites but about ISP behavior. ISP may maintain a registry of known speed test sites and shape traffic so that you get great results on those.

Registries aside, your ISP may also be detecting and throttling BT and/or VPN traffic, shaping sustained traffic, etc., meaning you will tend to get good speed test scores but get slow speeds if you attempt to use your connection in a real-life scenario.

And back to speed tests, they do tend to prefer servers located very favourably for ISP but not for you, routing to server on same ISP's network in the same city by default (this may be overridable by a tech-savvy user). I would assume they have agreements with ISPs on hosting and maintaining those servers, making any sort of manipulation a no-brainer for the ISP.

All in all, I routinely get cases where a speed test reports great results but due to whatever reason I get really slow effective speeds.

You mention same city. That could be part of the issue, if the ISP's connection to other cities is where the congestion is. I live in the middle of nowhere relatively speaking, so all my Internet traffic is non-local, and the same at my friends' and neighbors' houses.

Yeah, same, in real life I never need my connection to download something local or have a video call locally. However, speed test pre-selected local server on the same ISP network, so it reported unbelievable and useless number.

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