Free Internet Speed Test

Internet Speed Chart

Use our internet speed test tool to see how fast your internet speed really is. You’ll find out if your connection is fast enough for everyday activities like remote work or streaming movies — and you’ll find out if you’re really getting the speed that you’re paying for.

Is My Internet Speed Test Result Fast Enough?

Is your internet connection fast enough to handle your daily use? To find out, you’ll need to think about how your internet needs: Do you work from home? How big is your household? Is everyone streaming Netflix at the same time?

We can make this pretty easy for you: Our guide to how much internet speed you need includes a tool that can do the calculations for you.

Speed Test Terms: How to Understand Your Results

The two most important numbers in your speed test results are your download speed and your upload speed.

Upload speed: How quickly your connection will let you send information on the web. Upload speeds typically don’t have to be as fast as download speeds, because most things we transmit over the web are pretty small — like the text of an email, for example.

Download speed: How quickly your connection can receive information. This is the most important number for internet speed. Download speeds matter more than upload speeds, because almost everything you see on the internet needs to be transmitted to you. This isn’t just about the files you download; it’s also about the streaming movies you watch and the websites you load.

Latency: Sometimes called “lag,” this refers to the delay that occurs between information you send over the web and the results you see on your end.

Ping: A way of measuring latency. To get “ping,” we bounce information over a connection and back and measure how long the delay is — just like sonar devices make a “ping” sound and measure how long it takes the echo to bounce back.

Bits: Bits are the tiniest pieces of information we have: a 0 or a 1 in binary code. They can be grouped into kilobits (Kb, about 1,000 bits) and megabits (Mb, about a million bits) — or into bytes (8 bits).

Megabits per second (Mbps) and gigabits per second (Gbps): These units combine bits (a measure of information size) and time (seconds) to give us a speed. One Gbps is about 1,000 Mbps.

Bytes: Bytes are groups of 8 bits. They’re still very small! They can be grouped into kilobytes (KB — about 1,000 bytes) and megabytes (MB — about a million bytes). We tend to measure data in KB or MB (or even TB, meaning terabytes — about 1,000 MB), because bits, Kb, and Mb are too small to be convenient.

Bandwidth: When most people say “internet speed,” this is what they mean. Bandwidth is how much data can get across your connection at once, typically measured in Mbps or Gbps.

Throughput: This refers to how much “stuff” is going over a connection. Combine it with a timeframe (like “per second”), and you get bandwidth!

Transfer rate: This measures how fast data is being transferred over a connection. If you think of your internet speed as the capacity of a highway, this is how fast one particular truckload is moving.

Why Is My Internet Slower Than Expected?

Take our internet speed test, and you’re likely to find that your internet is not as fast as your ISP promised. So what’s going on? Here are a few possible culprits.

Internet Speeds Fluctuate

Unfortunately, internet speeds up to 30% slower than advertised are pretty typical. ISPs are allowed to advertise speeds of “up to” a certain maximum amount, even though they don’t always deliver it.

Think of the advertised maximum speed as the speed limit on a highway. On a day without much traffic, you can reach that maximum speed (or perhaps even exceed it)! On a day with lots of traffic, however, it’s a different story.

Your ISP doesn’t have a separate cable running into your town for every resident; instead, your connection joins up with your neighbors’ in larger and larger cables. Just like a highway, more traffic on this shared infrastructure can mean lower speeds.

Is My Modem or Router the Problem?

Your modem or router could be limiting your internet speeds. If you have super-fast fiber internet that you’re routing through an old, slow router, your internet is going to feel slow! That’s like using a firehose to fill up a squirt gun — the high-capacity part of your setup is being bottlenecked by the slow part.

Luckily, this is an easy fix. Look up your router and see whether it was designed for connections as fast as yours. You can check your ISP’s website to see compatible router options. Do the same for your modem.

Is My Internet Being Throttled?

One possible reason for slow internet is “throttling” — a deliberate slowdown of service from your ISP. Is that happening to you? Well, not necessarily. For more information on throttling, check out our guide on how to tell if your internet is being throttled.

What to Do if Your Speed Test Is Much Slower Than Expected

Wi-Fi vs. Ethernet Speeds

Wi-Fi is a way of connecting devices over the air. If you have a Wi-Fi router, what it’s doing is connecting your devices together into a home network, and then linking that network to the internet using your modem.

But you don’t have to use Wi-Fi to get online. You could just connect a device to your router the old-fashioned way: With a cable.

Wi-Fi is certainly more convenient for some devices, but there’s a trade-off. When it comes to transmitting data, wires are faster than air! You may want to use an Ethernet cable to connect certain devices to your router in order to optimize speeds. Video game consoles and desktop computers are good examples of devices that you might want to wire in.

Using Range Extenders

Sometimes, what feels like a “slow” internet connection is actually just an unreliable one. Just like radio stations can fade into fuzz when you get too far away, it’s possible to be too far from your Wi-Fi router. If getting closer isn’t convenient, you could set up range extenders in your house. Range extenders are affordable and can relay your router’s signal to every part of your home.

You could also consider a mesh router system. These multi-router setups blanket every corner of your home. They’re a top choice for tech aficionados and folks with larger properties.

Upgrade Your Plan

Sometimes, there’s nothing you can do on your end to meaningfully improve your internet speed. When that’s the case, it’s time to shop for a better plan. Check out the options on this page or enter your ZIP code into our search tool to get a complete list of the best internet options in your area.