I am on the west coast. My ISP has speeds up to 1Gbps.
Some of what you brought up are some of my concerns with testmy.net. Yes, Ookla throws out some of the drops and low speed parts of the test. Any speed test would have to. When first learning routes, DNS, etc you would have results inconsistent with the full test. For an accurate test of speed wouldn't you want your speed test with as few hops as possible to your testing server? Otherwise you are not just taking the local connections into account, but every hop and provider in between? For instance I have three providers between me and testmy.net. Within one providers (Cogent) it goes seven hops before exiting their network. When testing to a number of local ookla speedtests I am 2 or 3 hops away. I'm not saying testmy.net is bad, I'm just wondering if the testing is flawed for those of us that aren't local.
Small addition I realized while typing this. testmy.net defaults to Texas. I didn't realize there were other options until just now. I switched it to San Francisco and I am now showing 937.6Mbps. I test to LA 328.1Mbps and 668.9Mbps. I think I kind of answered my own question here and proved my point at the same time. Latency, especially at high bandwidth I am using matters a lot. I'm not sure if it does by I would highly recommend adding some form of geolocation to the test server choice.
Thanks for the response here. If anything it got me digging deeper.