Universal Speedtest snuck in a VPN - deleted!

[BrianBaughn]

Actually, a VPN isn't completely unrelated to a speed test.

A lot of ISPs do "traffic shaping", which is prioritizing certain kinds of traffic over others. A few years ago there was a lot of speculation that Comcast was cheating on speedtests by detecting traffic that looked like bandwidth testing, and prioritizing it. This makes your connection appear faster than it would be normally. If you've ever had slow Internet but a fast Internet speed test, this could be the reason.

A VPN can help hide your traffic type from low-effort traffic shaping, and thus help prevent that kind of cheating.

I agree. Couldn't a VPN service do the same thing? Can you draw conclusions from different results?

 

[ActionableMango]

I agree. Couldn't a VPN service do the same thing? Can you draw conclusions from different results?

A separate service could do the same thing, but there are problems with that. Low-cost and free VPNs tend to be slow, which defeats the purpose of using one for a speed test. In fact the low cost VPN I use is definitely slower.

A full-speed third-party VPN is a premium service and those tend to cost money. Even if there is a free trial period, you are typically creating a new account, password, and may have to provide payment information for a subscription that you then have to remember to cancel prior to the trial period expiring. This is burdensome, so a full-speed VPN feature built right into the speed test, and free for use just during a speed test, has merit. The company is claiming there is zero logging, which if true, actually makes it more private than many VPN providers which do have some sort of logging.

Granted, I don't know if that's specifically what Speedtest is doing, because I don't use their product. But my point is only that these two things aren't completely unrelated, which was a claim someone made earlier in the thread.