Leaderboard

You are seeing the real speed. Your 3Mbps is what speed you were able to achieve when downloading data from Testmy.net. The 1.2MB/sec you are seeing on the download in your screenshot is what you are able to achieve when downloading from that particular site, and is actually 9.6Mbps. You are seeing different units for the metric: MB/s = Mbps / 8 Mbps = MB/s * 8 If the Speedtest.net results were accurate, the 50Mbps would be about 6.25MB/sec for your downloads. You are seeing roughly 1/5 that. This may be an issue with your ISP peering, or it may be an issue of routes between you and where you are downloading your data from. I recommend you try switching TMN test servers and see how that affects your metrics.

It's not "faked" so much as the server that Speedtest chooses is deliberately the closest and fastest server. In some cases, it might still be within your ISP's network, which means what you are testing is you -> ISP, not ISP -> world.