When we first signed up to Netflix, it gave us a reason to check our home broadband speeds and an excuse to do something about it so we could stream up to 4K video seamlessly.
Two years ago Netflix launched FAST.com – a web portal that made it easy to check the speeds you’re getting from your internet service provider (ISP).
The site has now generated more than half a billion speed tests with usage doubling in the last seven months.
But users wanted even more information about their connection.
Now FAST.com has added the ability to measure connection latency as well as upload speed.
Upload speed is how fast you can upload data from a user’s device to the Internet.
Latency is the time it takes for data to travel from a user’s device to the server and back again.
And it will be measured on both unloaded and loaded connections.
Unloaded latency is when the round-trip time of a request with no other traffic present on a user’s network.
Loaded latency is when the measurement is taken when other data heavy applications are being used on the network.
The values for unloaded latency and loaded latency would be close to each other in an ideal scenario.
If not, this might be the reason why you’re having a poor experience with things like online gaming, video calls and just surfing the web.
We all want the internet to be faster but there are lots of factors at play including other users on the network or congestion with your internet service provider.
Having these new measurements on FAST.com would give users a better understanding of their Internet connection speed at any time of the day or night.
