Inconsistent Speedtest Results

Question

I recently noticed slow speeds so I tried two speedtests right after eachother.  The first was on speedtest.net and had this result: http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/4464458407  The second was on speedtest.comcast.net and had this result: http://results.speedtest.comcast.net/result/944128404.png Why the huge difference?  My internet speeds on all websites I've checked are consistent with the first, slower test.

Answer 1

This may now be fixed for you. If you check my thread "How do I report slow download speeds from out-of-area servers?" you'll see that it was spontaneously resolved around midnight mountain time. The problem seems to have been in Denver Comcast's network connection to the outside world. The Comcast network in Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona seems to be a common "local" network, and connecting from your home to that network always showed a good speed. That's why http://speedtest.comcast.com gave a good result: because it was local. However, if the data you were trying to download needed to come from outside those three states, it balked. That happened when either you used http://speedtest.comcast.com and pointed it to any server outside those three states (instead of just using the local default), or you used http://speedtest.net instead. I can't tell you whether it was deliberately fixed or whether it just happened because some machine got a scheduled reset at midnight. But it's OK now. Till the next time.