I am not sure why this old news is surfacing here today but I can give my 2 cents, since I sold speedchecker.com last year and were directly competing with Ookla.
The main business is selling the data. You use Speedtest.net to troubleshoot your connection but metrics captured with the test alongside location data give telcos invaluable insights on where they should improve their networks. Telcos pay 6 figures annually for this data and we have a few hundreds of of those big MNOs globally. This market is pretty big. Accenture is in trouble with their main consulting business due to AI so acquiring data business is one of the smart strategies they can implement to stay relevant.
To all commenters who think they can code it over the weekend, yes you are right. I coded my first speed checker over the weekend in 2008 but it took me 18 years to grow the user base , figure out entreprise sales strategy and exit. Its not easy as it seems.
As someone who worked at a CDN for years, I imagine the code is the easiest technical part. Managing the infrastructure, network connectivity, load balancing, and capacity planning would be the harder parts, outside of the sales and marketing bits.
If you don’t get all of those parts right, you are going to end up measuring your own bandwidth rather than the client’s.
The website, and backend code for the test. 10% of the software work. Which is what everyone seems to think.
The code to managing the infrastructure, network connectivity, load balancing, and capacity planning is the 90% of the software part. But even then it is only 10% of the technical thing.
Getting all the ISP onboard to have your server in their network / exchange and to deal with you, takes more time and effort then all the software part. But even then it is only 10% of the project.
The remaining 90%? Non technical part for Sales and Marketing and getting user traction.
To put that into perspective, the website can be done in a weekend was only 0.01% of the work.
The partner network of Speedtest is also impressive. I don't know how many speed tests they need to handle in parallel, but usually it's always enough to do speed tests up to 5-10 Gbit/s. With more and more fiber connections also latency becomes very relevant. Otherwise the tests would be meaningless. Speedtest manages to measure less than 1ms latency on my fiber connection.
Once you have a good amount of users testing, its not that difficult to get free servers from the ISPs. The secret is that on-net servers show testers better performance than off-net so every ISP wants to contribute the speed test server. If they dont do it they are shooting themselves in the foot by routing their traffic to competitor networks and getting test results behind their peers.
Whats even worst then your competitors can claim awards for the Fastest ISP and your marketing people are furious!
That was a persistent conversation with ISPs when I was building a white label WiFi product (competitor to Eero).
Some ISPs wanted us to pin to their servers in our app to have the best possible results (we refused) while others wanted us to use their servers because they offered 10G service and none of the other servers had that much throughout. So their true 10G line would be limited by the server, not the line.
Sure, but it's still a huge effort to set up all those partnerships and keep them alive. ISPs are often traditional and slow moving companies, it probably takes a lot of work to get those servers in place at the right locations.
It’s less than ninety days old and it isn’t (2025), so I wouldn’t consider this as ‘old news’ yet. TIL, for example! But if you think it’s a dupe/repost and should be squashed, email the mods a link to both this and the prior post so they can evaluate.
When you first built it, were you aware there was market for the data? Or was this something you discovered afterwards? It makes sense, but I wouldn’t have guessed it.
That test was totally inaccurate for me. It got the download right but upload was only 1/12 of my rated speed and 1/12 of what all the other tests (and my actual experience) tell me.
Any recommendations for similar tools to check network metrics other than speed ? Used to be a few free ones but would be nice to have an easy one to use
thanks fornthe insights. inthought it was a wopping number but this makes totally sense. never realised this was gather valuable data for network operators. cool insights!
"By integrating Ookla’s data products, including Speedtest®, Downdetector®, Ekahau®, and RootMetrics®, Accenture will help Communications Service Providers (CSPs), hyperscalers, and enterprises optimize the mission-critical Wi-Fi and 5G networks that power their digital core. [...] Ookla’s data platform is anchored by more than 250 million consumer-initiated tests per month, complemented by controlled drive, walk, and embedded testing options"[1]
Is there some legal reason to scatter announcements with that many ® symbols, or do they just do it for style reasons / because they think it makes the announcement look more impressive?
that's nuts, unless I'm missing something, it doesn't seem like those products are that mind blowingly complex... wow. Makes we want to try building my own for the hell of it.
Downdetector in fact just seems to be a website catalog with essentially a guestbook and hit counter...
Of course they are not complex. They do have a network effect though. If you go to your local ISP and say “hey, my 500mbps plan is only doing 100mbps on Speedtest.net”, they’ll “fix it” (usually by working with Ookla to put an edge endpoint on their network)
If you tell the “hey frankyspeeddetect.com isn’t doing my 500mbps” they’ll tell you to it’s an issue with that random website. ISPs and services reach out to Ookla to onboard with them because they have a network effect/mindshare of whatever you wanna call it
When I used a major cable ISP, often my connection seemed slow, so I'd go to speedtest.com. The speedtest would be fine... and then I would magically have faster network performance again.
It happened enough times that I'm suspicious the ISP had some way to detect if you run a speedtest, and then prioritized traffic to that customer.
> It happened enough times that I'm suspicious the ISP had some way to detect if you run a speedtest, and then prioritized traffic to that customer.
ISPs definitely know when you run a speedtest.net test. 90% of the time, the data for that comes from boxes/services they host themselves. It’s not exactly hidden either. It’s a typical program any ISP can sign up for and you can easily see the destination the test is running against. I won’t be surprised if some have some logic to prioritize particular subscribers plan once they have detected a test from them. They probably view it as a “customer support calls reduction” feature.
This was one of the reasons given, at the time, for why Netflix created fast.com. It's served by the same infra that does their streaming, and is thus difficult for isps to game. That is, it'd be hard for them to do some hack to make fast.com numbers without also benefiting Netflix streaming performance in the bargain.
Actually I thought Netflix had already acquired Ookla / speedtest.com, so I was surprised to see this headline. But it looks like this was just the Mandela effect.
That said, why didn't Netflix acquire the market leader in this space? Creating their own seems way less useful, since network effects are the whole point.
Because Netflix doesn't care what your connection to speedtest.net is, they care what your connection to your closest Netflix server box is. A while back, Comcast/your last-mile ISP was throttling traffic to Netflix to get Netflix to pay them. So while Netflix's box had plenty of bandwidth to their ISP, your ISP wasn't using it, intentionally. Fast.com was their response to that, so you could blame your ISP and not Netflix for being slow.
That’s a really over simplification of the issue. Plenty of Netflix edge CDNs are (and always were) ISP hosted. It’s a win-win for both and a complete no-brainer. The ISP v. Netflix argument was always about contract and margin negotiations. Flat rate, usage percentages, minimums, maximums, special plans, cuts, etc. who has the upper hand in the negotiation so to speak. Funnily enough the repeal of net neutrality gave those smaller ISPs much better position in the negotiation with big tech, not necessarily Comcast. The internet discord focused on Comcast and Verizon because fuck those guys. Who is gonna argue in favor of Comcast or Verizon? But the real winners were thousands of smaller regional ISPs.
All these numbers are fake. They are all special cased in most ISPs with the cooperation of cloudflare, Netflix, OOkla, Akamai, Google, etc. The centralization of the internet around AWS, Azure, Google, Netflix, Cloudflare, etc has been a godsend to ISPs and the internet infrastructure in general. Maintaining good network conditions to 4 or 5 dozen networks and working with them closely is so so much easier than maintaining full peer-to-peer network conditions. Go ahead and try to test internet speed to your home network over a wireguard VPN and compare it to the performance of the same VPN when connecting to any of the major services. Try to setup a tunnel between your house and your friends house in the same city and test the speed and compare it to fast.com or cloudflare.com or speedtest.net
I had not heard of http://speed.cloudflare.com either. I just tried it and I did not get accurate numbers. wifiman.com, from Ubiquiti/Unifi team does provide more accurate numbers. fast.com numbers are pretty accurate as well.
I'm a huge fan of https://speed.cloudflare.com/ and you'll have to come with better evidence. Also fast.com doesn't even give upload speed and latency.
That's why speedtest.net is a great purchase for Accenture. Of course Cloudflare's speed test is accurate: it's a test of how fast your connection is to their network. No more, no less. That their network doesn't have the same PoPs means it'll have different numbers than Ookla's test, your ISPs advertised numbers, Netflix's test, and any other speed test. But for people that don't see the Internet as a pile of different interconnected networks, the conclusion that a particular test is inaccurate is a win for Accenture.
the best part is Downdetector is inaccurate as hell - if AWS is genuinely down, folks get curious and search other providers, causing Downdetector to mark them as down too
Ookla has huge amounts of data, speedtest’s software is integrated into networks and used by hundreds of millions of users, they have the most comprehensive information about internet connections. You can recreate the software but you can’t recreate the data without decades of integration into what seems like every network.
https://www.ookla.com/ You can see an overview of the data they collect and sell on the corporate website
There is also the Italian one, AFAIK you can use this as an official tool to check whether your speed is at least the minimum speed that should be provided by contract.
I don't know whether it pings to italy even outside italy/eu
We used fast.com to speed test our new office internet connection and the next day got an irate email from corporate (who had argued we didn't need the new connection) about "watching Netflix all day". I imagine some C-level thought they had a real gotcha! moment until I showed them the site.
I read a while ago that certain ISPs will optimize the traffic to Netflix's servers, and so when you run fast.com (which is my default, by the way), you get your Internet speed for watching Netflix, but not necessarily for other things.
That was very relevant in some scenarios. When Spectrum was fighting with Netflix, they would force Netflix traffic to a peer circuit that was under provisioned as a shakedown tactic.
Fast.com would detect that, and you could bypass that nonsense by changing your DNS.
Out of curiosity, I just compared my home wifi between fast.com and cloudflare's speed tedt and got similar results, completely and definitely disproving (n=1) my claim above.
While neat that a government operates this, I’m not sure it’s a viable alternative for most users given that the servers are AFAIK all in Norway. For example, the latency from my network was 150-200ms (compared to 6ms for the Speedtest.net server) and the speed test results appear less consistent than they may be in/near Norway.
>A fartlek (Swedish for "speed play") is an unstructured, continuous running workout that mixes fast bursts of intense running with slower, recovery jogging.
I would never have had SpeedTest on my board of unicorns…that’s an unbelievable sale price. To all the agents who negotiated that deal, my hat is off to you.
They are embedded in several points in many, many networks all over the world. They get real-world metrics, sometimes live as events are happening. And they don't own most of this infra, it's hosted voluntarily inside service provider and corporate networks.
That seems like a lot for name recognition. I bet you could rebuild their technology for like $20m at the most, and buy 100% market share for like $100m easy. Unless they have some other assets other than the obvious?
Isn't Speedtest's huge dataset of Internet speeds mapped to time, location and IP address, as well as data on VPN usage (a user checks the speed of his/her direct connection then turns VPN on and checks over that too, all within the same session) such an asset?
I doubt they didn't collect all of that.
P.S. Now marry that huge dataset with services that Accenture provides, among others:
"In February 2025, Vice News spoke to a former Accenture employee under the condition of anonymity. His project on the WhatsApp team for Meta required him to sift through images and decide whether or not they depicted child sexual abuse, which he coped with "through a lot of substance abuse". The former employee claimed to have witnessed multiple missed opportunities to protect children, and alleged that one colleague had previously been arrested for possessing child abuse materials. In a statement, Accenture said they are "committed to helping companies keep their platforms safe through services such as content, advertising, and compliance reviews."¹
Fast.com has existed for 15 years yet isn't nearly as popular. It's easy to build a new speed test, but much harder to get people to use it.
Downdetector wins because of SEO. Most people don't get there directly, they google for "is $x down" and then get sent to downdecetor. Which from my understanding works by simply showing you how many people came to their site with those search terms. They don't actually check the sites.
Fast is a Netflix product so the fact that you've even heard of it is in direct relation to the weight of the brand that launched it.
speedtest.net has been the first search result on Google for "speed test" for decades. Partly the boost of domain SEO and partly the boost of it being an effective exit node for searches for that term for that long.
(Nobody searches "ookla" and nobody is going to search your tier-3 .com)
The main business is selling the data. You use Speedtest.net to troubleshoot your connection but metrics captured with the test alongside location data give telcos invaluable insights on where they should improve their networks. Telcos pay 6 figures annually for this data and we have a few hundreds of of those big MNOs globally. This market is pretty big. Accenture is in trouble with their main consulting business due to AI so acquiring data business is one of the smart strategies they can implement to stay relevant.
To all commenters who think they can code it over the weekend, yes you are right. I coded my first speed checker over the weekend in 2008 but it took me 18 years to grow the user base , figure out entreprise sales strategy and exit. Its not easy as it seems.
If you don’t get all of those parts right, you are going to end up measuring your own bandwidth rather than the client’s.
The website, and backend code for the test. 10% of the software work. Which is what everyone seems to think.
The code to managing the infrastructure, network connectivity, load balancing, and capacity planning is the 90% of the software part. But even then it is only 10% of the technical thing.
Getting all the ISP onboard to have your server in their network / exchange and to deal with you, takes more time and effort then all the software part. But even then it is only 10% of the project.
The remaining 90%? Non technical part for Sales and Marketing and getting user traction.
To put that into perspective, the website can be done in a weekend was only 0.01% of the work.
Whats even worst then your competitors can claim awards for the Fastest ISP and your marketing people are furious!
Some ISPs wanted us to pin to their servers in our app to have the best possible results (we refused) while others wanted us to use their servers because they offered 10G service and none of the other servers had that much throughout. So their true 10G line would be limited by the server, not the line.
What would you like to see?
[1] https://newsroom.accenture.com/news/2026/accenture-to-acquir...
Without it, it limits your ability to recover damages from infringement.
Downdetector in fact just seems to be a website catalog with essentially a guestbook and hit counter...
If you tell the “hey frankyspeeddetect.com isn’t doing my 500mbps” they’ll tell you to it’s an issue with that random website. ISPs and services reach out to Ookla to onboard with them because they have a network effect/mindshare of whatever you wanna call it
It happened enough times that I'm suspicious the ISP had some way to detect if you run a speedtest, and then prioritized traffic to that customer.
ISPs definitely know when you run a speedtest.net test. 90% of the time, the data for that comes from boxes/services they host themselves. It’s not exactly hidden either. It’s a typical program any ISP can sign up for and you can easily see the destination the test is running against. I won’t be surprised if some have some logic to prioritize particular subscribers plan once they have detected a test from them. They probably view it as a “customer support calls reduction” feature.
That said, why didn't Netflix acquire the market leader in this space? Creating their own seems way less useful, since network effects are the whole point.
Just tap ‘More Info’ to show them
Fast is a one click solution to finding out your download speed from Netflix.
Latency doesn't matter, nor does upload.
That's why speedtest.net is a great purchase for Accenture. Of course Cloudflare's speed test is accurate: it's a test of how fast your connection is to their network. No more, no less. That their network doesn't have the same PoPs means it'll have different numbers than Ookla's test, your ISPs advertised numbers, Netflix's test, and any other speed test. But for people that don't see the Internet as a pile of different interconnected networks, the conclusion that a particular test is inaccurate is a win for Accenture.
https://www.ookla.com/ You can see an overview of the data they collect and sell on the corporate website
that capilarity is not something you can achieve overnight.
I don't know whether it pings to italy even outside italy/eu
https://misurainternet.it/misura-speedtest/?speedtest=inizia
Fast.com would detect that, and you could bypass that nonsense by changing your DNS.
I doubt they didn't collect all of that.
P.S. Now marry that huge dataset with services that Accenture provides, among others:
"In February 2025, Vice News spoke to a former Accenture employee under the condition of anonymity. His project on the WhatsApp team for Meta required him to sift through images and decide whether or not they depicted child sexual abuse, which he coped with "through a lot of substance abuse". The former employee claimed to have witnessed multiple missed opportunities to protect children, and alleged that one colleague had previously been arrested for possessing child abuse materials. In a statement, Accenture said they are "committed to helping companies keep their platforms safe through services such as content, advertising, and compliance reviews."¹
¹: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture
Downdetector wins because of SEO. Most people don't get there directly, they google for "is $x down" and then get sent to downdecetor. Which from my understanding works by simply showing you how many people came to their site with those search terms. They don't actually check the sites.
speedtest.net has been the first search result on Google for "speed test" for decades. Partly the boost of domain SEO and partly the boost of it being an effective exit node for searches for that term for that long.
(Nobody searches "ookla" and nobody is going to search your tier-3 .com)