Is a speed test your go-to for home internet issues?

We've all been there: Sitting on the couch doom-scrolling social media Doing import work things and the internet is feeling sluggish, so you run a quick speed test and everything looks fine.

Sometimes you take it a step further (depends on how comfy the couch is) and start a ping from the command line to see if you notice anything odd, but it is really hard to watch the numbers scroll by and make any sense of them.

You can't find the issue, so you try and shrug it off, but it still feels like you have slow internet issues.

What are the limitations of speed tests?

• They only measure network performance at a specific moment in time. They do not provide a continuous view of fluctuations throughout the day.
• Other traffic on your network, like streaming a movie or playing a game, can make it look like you're getting slower speeds than you actually are. (My roommates get mad when I tell them to stop playing Call of Duty just so I can test the internet.)
• Ironically, running a speed test itself can actually slow down other traffic because they work by saturating the connection with data. So it shouldn't be run continuously.
• Speed tests only test for slow internet, not internal network issues.

This means you may see different results depending on when you run a test, making it difficult to diagnose ongoing or intermittent network and internet issues.

Real world example of a misleading speed test

(This is an actual screenshot of real network issues)

The internet connection being shown here is a gigabit fiber connection. Sure enough, during the period shown in the graphs, a speed test registered at 929 Mbps download speed. Everything looks fine.

However, looking at these graphs, it's pretty obvious there is a problem. Packet loss should basically always be zero. The cake is a lie! Or, at least the speed test is misleading.

And real world experience backed up the graphs: video calls would freeze for a second or two a few times an hour.

Without continuously monitoring with Latency Llama, it would be really hard to know for sure there was an internet issue.

So how should you monitor for home internet issues?

Unlike speed tests, latency and packet loss can be monitored continuously without significantly impacting network performance and can provide valuable insights into the stability and reliability of both your internal network and internet connection.

Using a service like Latency Llama (see what we did there?) makes it trivially easy to not just monitor your internet and local network, but you also get:

• 10 minute setup
• Visual graphs, so it is quick to see where potential network issues may be
• Alerts for internet problems right when they happen
• Helpful tips to help you solve the network problems

Understanding exactly where your internet issues are the moment they happen is particularly valuable if you have a home office, run a home server or homelab, are a gamer, or otherwise heavily use your network.