Sean

I had a quick look at the page source during the test as I was curious to see how the test works and what it might be getting stuck at.  I was actually quite surprised to see that it's just a lengthy set of comments with random characters, so what the browser receives is a very long webpage that mainly consists of invisible comments to bulk it up to the requested download size.  Quite clever.
 
So what I suspect is that some web filter is choking on the enormous web pages, which could be either some parental control (even if off) within the ISP, PC or even the virus checker scanning the page for anything suspicious and aborting the transfer after a certain amount of data is fetched. 
 
What I suggest is to try a https test.  Most web filters (especially within the ISP) are unable to analyse secure connections and in turn will just let the data pass through just like a file download.  You can ignore the security certificate warnings as they just mean the host is using a self-signed certificate. 
 
If the https test gets stuck on the larger block sizes, try disabling your virus checker temporarily or run a speed test on your mobile to see if the larger block sizes work. 

That's it now.
 

Hi Sean and CA3LE,
 
Sean, I saw your thread over on Three's support forum - which introduced me to the excellent testmy.net website - which then brought me to your thread here!!
 
If it's of any help, I'm also on Three Ireland and avail of the €20 All-You-Can-Eat pre-pay offer. Furthermore, I'm in Donegal too so not too far from yourself. I don't have LTE in my area but I do have a good, clear HSPA+ signal on an un-congested, rural cell site
 
I'd be happy to run some tests for you on my handset if only to prove the issue you've discovered is not specific to yourself. The thread above is a little crowded so if you want, you can send on the series of tests you'd like me to conduct and I'll post the results here

Wow, makes me feel fortunate.  Sounds like they should just tether a mobile hotspot or something.  If the 3G didn't have a data cap... what am I talking about, at the speed they have now they can't even do anything.  Who cares about the data cap.  Actually...
@ 256 Kbps you can download 112.5 MB per hour.  So you could theoretically push about 80 GB per month on that connection if it was consistently downloading.
@ 7.2 Mbps you could download 3168 MB per hour.  So if you have a 5GB data cap and you don't control your use it could get out of control quickly.  Consistently downloading at that speed for a month would theoretically result in 2.18 TB of transfer. 
Now the upload... they can only upload 7 MB per hour.  Ouch.  It's like they have dial up, except it's 2015 and the Internet is more bandwidth hungry.   At a constant 2 kB/s, it could theoretically transfer 4.9 GB per month. ((2*86400*30)/1024)/1024
Keep old TMN [removed] in mind if you ever have a problem running the current version of TMN on older computers or slower connections.
Besides while the test was running, did TMN load faster for you than most other websites on that connection?

I was visiting someone earlier today who has satellite Internet and I asked if I could run a speed test on their connection.  Their service is Q Sat and they are paying €35/month.  They don't know what speed they're suppose to get, but they just use it for light Internet access such as Gmail and Facebook and said it's been slow since they first got it in, but have to put up with it due to no DSL in their area.
So I fired up TestMy, signed in and picked the 12MB download test.  After a short while, I gave up waiting with it only reaching 20% and just went for the automatic test.  I then tried an upload test, which timed out doing the initial 96KB test, so tried it again and this time it completed, so the following is what one can expect on Satellite Internet in Ireland, at least on the Q Sat service:

The following is a multi-threaded test with the default 256KB block size.  When I tried a larger block, it got stuck at 0%.

One more linear test, but with the UK server instead of Germany above:

I had my spare phone with which I'm testing Meteor with and to their surprise, I picked up a 3 bar 3G signal in the front window.  Their mobile is with Vodafone which doesn't pick up anything and the same with my main Three phone.  So I decided to tether their laptop with my phone on Meteor just to run a speed test...

It was a complete shock to them, particularly when they tried Gmail that normally takes a minute to reach the Inbox page over satellite.  I spoke with Eircom just to see whether DSL is available on their line and sure enough it's not.  Going by Q Sat's website, they don't make any claims about speed or being able to stream video, but it's pretty clear it's no match for even a 3G connection and I wouldn't be surprised if the other satellite operators here have a similar performance on their consumer packages. 

From a quick test with my laptop, you can remove the Windows Account from your PC account as follows.  My files and settings (wallpaper, etc.) remained as they were before switching back to a local account:
Go into Start menu -> Settings, then click "Sign in with a local account instead" Type your password and click 'Next'. Leave the username field as is and the password fields blank and click 'Next'. It will apply the change and sign out.  Click the avatar to log back in.  I then tested the Windows Store by picking a free App and installing it.  It asked me for my Windows account password and then installed the app.  When I rebooted afterwards, it was still set up as a local account, i.e. automatically logged me in and no e-mail address shown while logging in.
Edit: I found something rather interesting - My OneDrive folder still works after switching my laptop back to a local account.  The main reason I originally had my laptop configured with a Microsoft account was that OneDrive said I must use a Microsoft account to log in to be able to use OneDrive, yet I now have OneDrive still syncing fine after switching back to a local account. Whoops...

That's no problem - The main thing is being able to test whether an ISP is discriminating between https and http traffic and I think the linear test does that pretty well.
I posted on the Three support forum showing the drastic speed differences between http and https, asking why this is.  After the usual "Try this & that" responses, it made no difference in that I continued to get vast difference between http and https speed tests, so am now waiting to see what their network team responds with.  Today is also the worst I've seen their network perform where the TestMy download page was intermittently timing out just trying to bring up the page to start the regular http test (test result was about 150kbps on LTE!), while the https test had no problem once I dismissed the security certificate warnings.
I tried with the Meteor network and both http and https tests gave similar results, so Meteor doesn't seem to prioritise or throttle one protocol over the other. 

That's no problem - The main thing is being able to test whether an ISP is discriminating between https and http traffic and I think the linear test does that pretty well.
I posted on the Three support forum showing the drastic speed differences between http and https, asking why this is.  After the usual "Try this & that" responses, it made no difference in that I continued to get vast difference between http and https speed tests, so am now waiting to see what their network team responds with.  Today is also the worst I've seen their network perform where the TestMy download page was intermittently timing out just trying to bring up the page to start the regular http test (test result was about 150kbps on LTE!), while the https test had no problem once I dismissed the security certificate warnings.
I tried with the Meteor network and both http and https tests gave similar results, so Meteor doesn't seem to prioritise or throttle one protocol over the other. 

You shouldn't get the warnings anymore, as long as you've accepted the cert on both testmy.net and the server you've selected.
You can now visit https://testmy.net and it will work with all servers.  Let me know if you have any problems.  Later I'll make a way to differentiate the tests taken with ssl (https) in the database.

This post requires a +1 like times ten interwebz button

Alright, it's only on one server right now and you have to manually call upon it with a URL.  I'll make sure this becomes an option everyone can easily use.
 https://co.testmy.net/SmarTest/down - https://co.testmy.net/SmarTest/up (or add https to any of the common test URLs e.g. https://co.testmy.net/SmarTest/combinedAuto - https://co.testmy.net/dl-1MB and https://co.testmy.net/ul-1MB)
I'll let you know when I duplicate this across the network.  Thanks for the suggestion.  

Have you used the testmy.net multithreaded tests? With this tool, you can set specific server locations to further pin point the slow connection. 
Interesting idea ISP's have on their placement of said flash speed tests, as they are a direct link from you, simply to them. Which does not at all show any representation of what speeds the end user has the ability to achieve, in real world applications. 
Who knows what type of configuration filters are set, after the speed testing node at the ISP. Many, for certain. 
You'll see peering issues come out when attempting to stream, or the specific QOS settings they might give to timeframes, or vendors across the network. 
Furthermore , the ISP is specifically looking for issues within it's own network, and completely ignore who they are peered with, which is some of the most vital connections on the net itself. 

Well maybe all the Notifying Google of the "Aw Snap" BS worked as I finally was able to run a combined test and did not get that annoying message just a few seconds ago. 

I'll work on this for you.  

One issue I'm noticing now and again particularly with mobile broadband providers is that some treat http and https traffic differently.  A good example I posted a while back is where the 3 Ireland mobile provider was providing considerably quicker throughput with https traffic than http traffic. 
Before my recent trip to California, I bought a 3UK 1GB prepay SIM so I could use data on my phone during my trip as it does not have roaming charges in the USA.  While this worked for most of my trip, I noticed some websites were incredibly slow to load.  When I was back in Ireland, I did some further tests with that SIM with the remaining data credit and sure enough it was a similar issue here also and found that any website using https including Three's own website took a very long time to load.  When I tried YouTube (which uses https), it would play a grainy picture for a few seconds, then buffer for a while and repeat.  Yet when I ran a speed test, I kept getting 6Mbps to 10Mbps with TestMy, which is carried out over http.  Other streaming services were practically unusable and even a 128kbps streaming radio station could not play without endlessly rebuffering. 
So while it's pretty clear Three UK throttles pretty much everything besides plain http traffic when roaming on a 3 like home network, I would be curious to actually run a speed test on a https connection just to see what limited bandwidth they are throttling down to. 
I could not find any other site that performs such tests, yet it seems to be a pretty common search going by Google's autocomplete:

So I assume there must be some interest in such a test.

One likely issue that's going on is high latency or jitter in the connection.  For example, as the packets are being streamed to and from the ISP, some could be arriving much later or earlier than other packets.  While most streaming services such as YouTube can handle this as they buffer the connection, with video calls, any packets that arrive out of sequence are effectively dropped as the video needs to be shown in real time, in turn resulting in the picture stuttering.
To test how stable your connection is while it's idle, bring up a command prompt and running: ping -t 8.8.8.8
The ping results should be fairly consistent and stay below 100ms like the following.  Make sure there is nothing in the background using the connection, i.e. nothing downloading or uploading.  The '-n 100' in my screenshot just means to ping 100 times instead of continuously for '-t'.

I would suggest monitoring this for a minute or two in case there is an intermittent hiccup.  If the ping results fluctuate about the place, then it's quite possibly high contention on your ISP or something within your home network using the connection, such as a phone (e.g. I've come across game apps that continuously use the connection in the background). 
To stop the ping test and see the results, press Ctrl + C.
The next time you start a video call, run this ping test again with the video call active.  If the ping times start jumping about the place, then it's a latency/jitter issue with the connection.  While it could be possible the router may be causing this, it's more likely caused by contention within the ISP.
The following is an example with my fixed wireless connection.  Basically the area highlighted in red would have resulted in broken up video/voice had I been on a call:

One likely issue that's going on is high latency or jitter in the connection.  For example, as the packets are being streamed to and from the ISP, some could be arriving much later or earlier than other packets.  While most streaming services such as YouTube can handle this as they buffer the connection, with video calls, any packets that arrive out of sequence are effectively dropped as the video needs to be shown in real time, in turn resulting in the picture stuttering.
To test how stable your connection is while it's idle, bring up a command prompt and running: ping -t 8.8.8.8
The ping results should be fairly consistent and stay below 100ms like the following.  Make sure there is nothing in the background using the connection, i.e. nothing downloading or uploading.  The '-n 100' in my screenshot just means to ping 100 times instead of continuously for '-t'.

I would suggest monitoring this for a minute or two in case there is an intermittent hiccup.  If the ping results fluctuate about the place, then it's quite possibly high contention on your ISP or something within your home network using the connection, such as a phone (e.g. I've come across game apps that continuously use the connection in the background). 
To stop the ping test and see the results, press Ctrl + C.
The next time you start a video call, run this ping test again with the video call active.  If the ping times start jumping about the place, then it's a latency/jitter issue with the connection.  While it could be possible the router may be causing this, it's more likely caused by contention within the ISP.
The following is an example with my fixed wireless connection.  Basically the area highlighted in red would have resulted in broken up video/voice had I been on a call:

Welcome aboard
I would suggest trying a multi-threaded download test to see what speed you get:  https://testmy.net/multithread
Place a tick mark next to your nearest server and leave the rest unchecked, e.g. if you're in the UK, tick 'London' only and then click 'Test my Internet' 
If you get a faster download result, then it is quite likely your ISP is either only able to handle about 1Mbps per connection or is limiting individual connections to this rate.  Speedtest.net performs a multi-threaded test.  TestMy does not have multi-threaded uplink test, at least not at this time.

Welcome aboard
I would suggest trying a multi-threaded download test to see what speed you get:  https://testmy.net/multithread
Place a tick mark next to your nearest server and leave the rest unchecked, e.g. if you're in the UK, tick 'London' only and then click 'Test my Internet' 
If you get a faster download result, then it is quite likely your ISP is either only able to handle about 1Mbps per connection or is limiting individual connections to this rate.  Speedtest.net performs a multi-threaded test.  TestMy does not have multi-threaded uplink test, at least not at this time.

Two more things to add:
Testing very slow connections (especially uplink):
Based on my experience, Ookla's browser based Speedtest can't seem to handle connections below about 0.1Mbps, at least on the uplink.  My fixed wireless ISP's connection has had an issue for over a month now where the uplink struggles to perform better than 0.1Mbps, then intermittently spikes to about 9Mbps as shown below:

While Ookla's browser based Speedtest seems to measure the link during the brief periods the uplink is running quick, I have yet to see it record a single speed test with a result below 0.1Mbps.  When the uplink is running slow, this is what happens when I run the Ookla's Speedtest:

That's as far as it gets, even when I check an hour later - It stalls like trying to drive a manual gear stick car below 5MPH without pressing the clutch.
I'm not sure if this ISP has access to the test results since it hosts an Ookla server, but if it does, they'll obviously be skewed as the only test results it would have logged from my end were the ones the test successfully completed, i.e. during the brief periods my uplink worked.  Then again, this ISP also uses a carrier grade NAT, so if it did have access to the logs with IP addresses, it probably couldn't map them with each logged IP address being shared amongst many customers.
Single threaded tests:
Another problem I noticed with Ookla's app is that it does not provide the ability to perform a single threaded speed test.  While multi-threaded tests are great at determining the maximum bandwidth available on an ISP's connection, it does not show what one will get when streaming video or even downloading a large individual file.  This potentially also explains why some users who get fast results on Speedtest have problems with video on demand services repetitively buffering or showing a grainy low resolution stream.
While on a business trip in Germany, I stayed at a Leonardo hotel which had plenty of advertising about having free Wi-Fi.  Going by Ookla's Speedtest, it looked reasonably good with a 2Mb download test result, yet when I tried watching YouTube, it would only play in 240p with a grainy picture even though I know 2Mbps is plenty to play videos at 480p and some even at 720p. 
When I tested with TestMy, sure enough it reported my speed as about 500kbps consistently, which explains the YouTube playback problem.  When I started a download in my web browser, it came in at a steady 60KB/s.  However, when I started running simultaneous downloads, each single one continued to run at about 60KB/s.  Sure enough, when I ran TestMy in multi-threaded mode, I got over 2Mbps as the test result.
I saw a flyer on the table mentioning about high speed Wi-Fi, so was curious to see what it said after my strange Wi-Fi experience.  It mentioned that the complementary Wi-Fi is suitable for general web browsing and e-mail only and in order to stream video, download large files and so on, I would need to purchase premium Wi-Fi access for €8 per hour.
So what I reckon they've done is throttle individual connections to 500kbps, which is just fast enough to comfortably browse the web as web browsers make multi-threaded connections to download all the web page elements, pictures, etc.  However, as video streaming services only establish a single connection to run the stream, 500kbps is not enough for most streaming services as many require at least 1Mbps to stream at all, yet Ookla's Speedtest will falsely give the impression that the connection is well capable of streaming video when throttling occurs on individual connections.
Some mobile/cellular and fixed wireless services also seem to throttle individual connections, which effectively reduces network load as video streaming services generally stream at the maximum resolution possible over a single connection.  For example, a 4G provider could throttle individual connections at 4Mbps would prevent most streaming services being able to play full HD, yet if one uses the popular Speedtest app which performs a multi-threaded test, it will report a vastly higher test result.

I get the impression that the IP address is the victim of a DDoS attack, where Verizon has decided to null route all incoming traffic sent to it on most or all its routers to minimise traffic on its network from the attack. 
If this is the case, the next hop after your home router would be one of their routers (assuming your ISP is Verizon), hence no reply after your router.  For the Level3 site traceroute, the third hop shown in your screenshot is at Verizon, so the next hop inside their network would also be one of their routers probably configured to null route that IP address.
A few more tests worth trying would be a TCP traceroute and a UDP traceroute.  If both give a similar result, then it's most likely that IP address is null routed rather than just ICMP filtering to block a trace route to it.

I'll keep an eye out for it. 
My fixed wireless ISP's uplink intermittently went fast earlier and it was during that time when this bug crept up. 
At the moment, it's back down to a snails crawl of 20kbps from just over 9Mbps earlier.  In fact, the ISPs preferred test site Speedtest.net can't even measure the uplink when it's that slow - It just gets stuck!
I thought I was in luck of getting a faster Internet connection earlier when a sales person from the major telecom provider Eir came to our house claiming to offer "Next generation consistent broadband".  So I went on to ask him what about the speed and he said you'll get a consistent 4Mbps guaranteed, no buffering and so on.  I tried explaining that this is what I'm currently getting on DSL, but he really tried to say Eir's 4Mbps connection will be considerably quicker than what I currently have!   As I'm already stuck in an 18 month contract, I mentioned and he finally went away.

I'll keep an eye out for it. 
My fixed wireless ISP's uplink intermittently went fast earlier and it was during that time when this bug crept up. 
At the moment, it's back down to a snails crawl of 20kbps from just over 9Mbps earlier.  In fact, the ISPs preferred test site Speedtest.net can't even measure the uplink when it's that slow - It just gets stuck!
I thought I was in luck of getting a faster Internet connection earlier when a sales person from the major telecom provider Eir came to our house claiming to offer "Next generation consistent broadband".  So I went on to ask him what about the speed and he said you'll get a consistent 4Mbps guaranteed, no buffering and so on.  I tried explaining that this is what I'm currently getting on DSL, but he really tried to say Eir's 4Mbps connection will be considerably quicker than what I currently have!   As I'm already stuck in an 18 month contract, I mentioned and he finally went away.

Awesome, glad to hear that it's working good for you.
The smileys are still there.  You just have to click a couple extra times to see them all.

 

I'll take time soon to go over the emoticons, remove duplicates and include some new ones.
Thanks as always! -- you're awesome!

As far as I can tell, this is now fixed.
I tried a handful of upload tests here as well as remotely on my home PC and the upload progressed to larger block sizes until it took at least 5 seconds to complete.
Going off topic - I think the forum reply smiley choice has lost some of its smileys.