The results and any associated usefulness are thus somewhat subjective, while people on slower connections will probably just find that their existing annoyances with slow speeds are merely reinforced. The catch here is that Ookla’s speedtest service will always be trying to push as much data down your pipe as possible during the test, which won’t necessarily always reflect how things work in the real-world. Latency is also measured while the upload test is in progress to see how it is affected by upload activity on your network, like someone on your home network uploading a year’s worth of photos.

Latency is measured while the download test is in progress to see how it is affected by download activity on your network, like a household member downloading a large game while you’re trying to work. This test at the beginning of your Speedtest measures the response of a request on your network as if it is not in use.

The loaded latency test measures ping during three stages, which we’ve summarised below. Ookla previously only provided a single result for latency, but their new test has been designed to measure “ loaded latency“, giving a more nuanced picture of responsiveness and what the bottlenecks in your connection really are. 1000ms = 1 second) and modern broadband connections will often have an average latency of anything from around c.5ms to 40ms (what is normal for your connection will depend on lots of different factors – see below)Ī faster score (shortest time) is always best for latency, although the times can be affected by various things, such as the performance of remote internet servers, the connection technology being used, network congestion at your ISP, peering / routing problems and the setup of your own home network etc.

The delay is measured in milliseconds (e.g. Latency is a measure of the time that it takes for a packet of data to travel from your computer to a remote server and then back again (ping). Ookla, which runs the popular service for broadband and mobile connections, has announced that they’ve redesigned how they measure latency to give users better access to this metric and to provide more information so that you can better “ understand where the bottlenecks in your network’s responsiveness” are.

Test ping by ookla