How to Check Your Internet Speed
Although internet speed is not that important when it comes to gaming, having a fast connection means you can download your games faster and watch content in very high resolutions without interruptions.
While there are ways to optimize your connection, having a fast internet plan and receiving the full speed from your ISP is probably 99% of what makes a difference. There are different tools to check whether you are receiving your full bandwidth but we will talk about the most popular options you have free access to.
Checking Internet Speeds – A Quick Test
The fastest and simplest way to find out your internet speed is to open Speedtest and let it run. Speedtest is pretty consistent and has a lot of servers it can ping allowing for an accurate result. Speedtest will tell you your download/upload speed, and will also give you some latency numbers during idle times, download, and upload.
In short, if you want a quick test to see if you have access to your full bandwidth Speedtest will do the job well.
Checking Internet Speeds – A More Detailed Look
While Speedtest is fast it does not give you a lot of metrics in terms of what it is measuring, how it does it, and what the latencies are. A more in-depth look regarding your internet speed can be acquired through testing using speed.cloudflare.com.
This tool is built to be a more accurate representation of what your internet speed is during use. To measure speed the test uploads big files and takes the 90th percentile of what your speed value is. For ping, it looks at how long it takes before your browser receives data, and the jitter is calculated by looking at the average ping delta between any two consecutive runs.
A similar tool to this is the Waveform latency and speed test that we recommended using while testing for bufferbloat. The reason is that this tool is a good indication of your internet speed and how stable your connection is since it gives you measurements for your network while unloaded and while uploading/downloading files.
Optimally, you would use all 3 sites (or you could use other sites/utilities you know of) to test your internet connection and see if the results are comparable.