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As someone who worked at a CDN for years, I imagine the code is the easiest technical part. Managing the infrastructure, network connectivity, load balancing, and capacity planning would be the harder parts, outside of the sales and marketing bits.

If you don’t get all of those parts right, you are going to end up measuring your own bandwidth rather than the client’s.

> but it took me 18 years to grow the user base , figure out entreprise sales strategy and exit.

The audience here has never wanted to admit that the codebase doesn't really matter. Now that codebases can be created in a weekend, people are opening their eyes to this sentiment - the hard part is the sales, the code is easy.

The partner network of Speedtest is also impressive. I don't know how many speed tests they need to handle in parallel, but usually it's always enough to do speed tests up to 5-10 Gbit/s. With more and more fiber connections also latency becomes very relevant. Otherwise the tests would be meaningless. Speedtest manages to measure less than 1ms latency on my fiber connection.

When you first built it, were you aware there was market for the data? Or was this something you discovered afterwards? It makes sense, but I wouldn’t have guessed it.

It’s less than ninety days old and it isn’t (2025), so I wouldn’t consider this as ‘old news’ yet. TIL, for example! But if you think it’s a dupe/repost and should be squashed, email the mods a link to both this and the prior post so they can evaluate.

Telcos wanting to improve their networks is news to me. I always thought providing the bare minimum is basically their business model.

How come ISPs aren't providing that data internally from observing their own traffic ?

Thank you for your service ( the product was/is -- haven't used in a while -- useful ).

I think this is the part that people do not appreciate. Sometimes it genuinely it is not the difficulty of the task from a pure programming perspective, but 1) getting the users and 2) getting people to pay for the service and 3) getting the right people to sign off on that.

It is very similar in banking. The products themselves are not super hard ( though the challenges are real ), buy just getting to talk to the right people is a hassle.

ISP seems to give higher network priority to Ookla so I'm not sure how useful it is compared to actual experience.

@forcer would love to know how you "grow the user base , figure out entreprise sales strategy and exit"

Are you able to share the details on how it was valued? Was it N times revenue or anything like that? I have tried to value a property several parties are interested in and found it quite mysterious.

thanks fornthe insights. inthought it was a wopping number but this makes totally sense. never realised this was gather valuable data for network operators. cool insights!

Any recommendations for similar tools to check network metrics other than speed ? Used to be a few free ones but would be nice to have an easy one to use

> Accenture is in trouble with their main consulting business due to AI

Is this something being seen across all outsourcers like Accenture, Wipro, Infosys etc?

> To all commenters who think they can code it over the weekend, yes you are right... but it took me 18 years to grow the user base

I should get this printed and framed

MNOs => Mobile Network Operators

All it takes to defeat the business model is https://openspeedtest.com/

Did you ever fear that any big player like Google, Apple, Valve (though fewer mobiles), Meta, OpenAI (nowadays), etc decide to get involved?

what was the point where you had enough data to make it worthwhile for telcos?

> I coded my first speed checker over the weekend in 2008 but it took me 18 years to grow the user base , figure out entreprise sales strategy and exit. Its not easy as it seems.

The biggest surprise (imo) when you start a business is how little of running a business is actually directly about the product. Having a product is essential, sure, and having a good product is nice, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Huh, interesting, I thought ISP would get enough metrics from their own devices

Just wanted to say congratulations!

Why did you sell it?

Is there some legal reason to scatter announcements with that many ® symbols, or do they just do it for style reasons / because they think it makes the announcement look more impressive?

Of course they are not complex. They do have a network effect though. If you go to your local ISP and say “hey, my 500mbps plan is only doing 100mbps on Speedtest.net”, they’ll “fix it” (usually by working with Ookla to put an edge endpoint on their network)

If you tell the “hey frankyspeeddetect.com isn’t doing my 500mbps” they’ll tell you to it’s an issue with that random website. ISPs and services reach out to Ookla to onboard with them because they have a network effect/mindshare of whatever you wanna call it

The valuation must be outside of the tech. Are there relationships or contracts Accenture is getting access to?

thefacebook.com was developed in a few days, too. The value was never in the code.

the best part is Downdetector is inaccurate as hell - if AWS is genuinely down, folks get curious and search other providers, causing Downdetector to mark them as down too

dont miss it, its almost all about users and revenue not how complex or simple product is.

Ookla has huge amounts of data, speedtest’s software is integrated into networks and used by hundreds of millions of users, they have the most comprehensive information about internet connections. You can recreate the software but you can’t recreate the data without decades of integration into what seems like every network.

https://www.ookla.com/ You can see an overview of the data they collect and sell on the corporate website

That's a lot of money just for network topography, but may someone let them in and it has a whole map of an otherwise hidden or inaccessible network.

You’re not paying for the tech, you’re paying for the name and the users. Speedyest claims 40m unique users per month.

The fact that you think that the code is all that material here is exactly why you aren’t the person to be doing this. Go right ahead.

ZIR SV culture has built multiple generations of nerds that think that they can just effortlessly become billionaires. Ridiculous brain rot.

speedtest has a lot of volunteers hosting local servers, which you need to do a good last mile speed test.

that capilarity is not something you can achieve overnight.

The valuation is the name recognition and that that’s where people go to do those things

It's not the net fart that kills your connection, it is the server smell.

There is also the Italian one, AFAIK you can use this as an official tool to check whether your speed is at least the minimum speed that should be provided by contract.

I don't know whether it pings to italy even outside italy/eu

https://misurainternet.it/misura-speedtest/?speedtest=inizia

fast.com is my go-to in the rare case I need to check network speed these days

For Swedish users: <https://www.bredbandskollen.se/>

While neat that a government operates this, I’m not sure it’s a viable alternative for most users given that the servers are AFAIK all in Norway. For example, the latency from my network was 150-200ms (compared to 6ms for the Speedtest.net server) and the speed test results appear less consistent than they may be in/near Norway.

why is it named this? i'm guessing "fart" means something different in your language :-)

I recommend https://speed.cloudflare.com/ personally.

Accenture is more resilient than cockroaches.

Terrible domain name.

They are embedded in several points in many, many networks all over the world. They get real-world metrics, sometimes live as events are happening. And they don't own most of this infra, it's hosted voluntarily inside service provider and corporate networks.

https://speed.cloudflare.com

It's almost always user data these days, so probably that.

Maybe the owners were ready to cash out and move on with life?

Isn't Speedtest's huge dataset of Internet speeds mapped to time, location and IP address, as well as data on VPN usage (a user checks the speed of his/her direct connection then turns VPN on and checks over that too, all within the same session) such an asset?

I doubt they didn't collect all of that.

P.S. Now marry that huge dataset with services that Accenture provides, among others:

"In February 2025, Vice News spoke to a former Accenture employee under the condition of anonymity. His project on the WhatsApp team for Meta required him to sift through images and decide whether or not they depicted child sexual abuse, which he coped with "through a lot of substance abuse". The former employee claimed to have witnessed multiple missed opportunities to protect children, and alleged that one colleague had previously been arrested for possessing child abuse materials. In a statement, Accenture said they are "committed to helping companies keep their platforms safe through services such as content, advertising, and compliance reviews."¹

¹: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture

Fast.com has existed for 15 years yet isn't nearly as popular. It's easy to build a new speed test, but much harder to get people to use it.

Downdetector wins because of SEO. Most people don't get there directly, they google for "is $x down" and then get sent to downdecetor. Which from my understanding works by simply showing you how many people came to their site with those search terms. They don't actually check the sites.

It takes more than money to supplant the name brand that every ISP games and every front line support worker uses by name

selling peoples ip addres for some reason along with whatever privacy invasion tech they have.