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Ookla maintains a fleet of speed-testing servers all over the world. A user chosen server downloads a file of incompressible data to the user's client and then uploads it. They calculate the throughput by knowing the amount of data transferred and then dividing this by the time taken to transfer the data in each direction. A summary of this data is provided to the client user in real-time showing average download speed, upload speed, and ping Round Trip Time (RTT).
At the time of the data, Ookla speedtest.net had 193 servers in 68 countries. The most servers/country were US (54), Australia (7), Russia(6), Brazil, Canada, Romania (5). A map of the locations of the servers and the number of servers / country is seen below.
Ookla servers/country | |
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The data is also archived together with the location of the client. This is determined based on the client IP address. Speedtest.net uses GeoIP databases from MaxMind to position the client and by default locate the closest server since the transfer speed depends on the TCP window and TCP is not usually optimized for increased RTT. While the information in MaxMind's GeoIP databases is very accurate, it is not perfect. More information on Ookla's speed test can be found here.
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A map of the Ookla throughputs measured for clients in the various countries of the world is shown below. The poor coverage for Sub-Saharan Africa (there was no data for countries in white) is seen as is the much better performance for developed regions such as N. America, Europe, Japan and Australaisia compared to developing regions.
Map of Ookla servers Map of Ookla Download Speedtest throughputs | Map of Ookla Upload Speedtest Throughputs | Map of Ookla Speedtest ratio of Upload/Download | |
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A comparison of the Ookla upload versus download throughput speeds is seen below on the left. Also the ratio of upload/download is seen in the map to the right above.In all cases the download exceeds the upload speed. The best value for the ratio of up/down is 80% (Azerbaijan). The worst is 9% (Portugal), the median is 34% +- 17%. It is seen that several Eastern European countries such as Russia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Moldova have anomalously high upload throughput speeds. Looking at the map of Ookla servers we believe there are several good servers in Romania, Bulgaria and Moldova able to provide high throughput for clients. Several countries in Western Europe such as Portugal, Belgium, France and Germany have anomalously low upload throughput speeds. This may be the servers, or possibly the broadband is configured very asymmetrically.
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