Speed isn’t the only quantifiable metric that we look at.
Since internet speeds change constantly based on server load, how fast your connection is, and a gazillion other factors, we feel this provides a better picture of what you can expect from a service, on the whole, than merely quoting the exact upload/download speeds we encountered during testing. I then used those scores to calculate a percentage of difference in speeds, which is what you’ll see in our reviews. The speeds Ookla captured were then averaged, providing us with a final numeric score.
I used this setup to ensure that the numbers that Ookla produced were not stymied by anything else that my computer may have been doing at the time. The only traffic on my system able to upload or download any data was Ookla. To test upload and download speeds, I closed down all background internet processes on my Mac, using TripMode.
