A new speed testing tool from Google is designed to help you see how your broadband connection compares to others in your ISP, area, state and country.
Google is not only considering a major push to boost US net users’ connection speeds, but is backing its effort with a YouTube feature that not only tracks your broadband performance, but compares it with that of others in your region.
The YouTube Video Speed History tool is hidden in the Help menus at the bottom of the main YouTube page or available here, and provides a pair of charts showing current and historical video transfer speeds. The tool also offers a test video that shows current performance as it streams a sample video.
With petabytes of video to work with, YouTube is a ripe base for collecting performance statistics, but it’s only recently that those statistics have been available. YouTube compares your performance with that of people on your ISP, in your city, in your region, in your country, and globally.
These statistics may well prove surprising to those who believe they’re getting better speeds than they actually are; likewise, they may prove surprising to those who are convinced their service is slower than it really is because distant web sites are running at below optimal speed.
In our tests, the Video Speed History tool showed an average speed of 10Mbps, which ranked well above the average for our ISP (Optus) and even higher above the overall average in Melbourne.
Serving up the sample video in 720p (a 1280x720 video weighing in at 646MB), YouTube reported a streaming HTTP speed that peaked around 18Mbps. Transferring the 92MB 360p version of the video (at 854x480 resolution) saw speed of around 16Mbps. Those results are consistent with the results of speedtest.net, which reported download speed of 16.67MBps.
Google’s motivation for outing YouTube performance figures may be more than just informational, however: with its recently-announced plan to bring 1Gbps Ethernet services to between 50,000 and 500,000 US residents and its recent efforts to replace HTTP with the faster SPDY protocol, the company has clearly made speed boosting a strategic goal for this year and beyond.
And whether the YouTube speed checker makes a liar out of your ISP or not, it’s going to be an easy way to chart speed improvements in your region over time. It might also convince you to switch ISPs, if others rated using the tool prove to be delivering substantially higher speeds.