How to test speed of a satellite internet provider?

[RayArdia]

Newbie to the forum, I live in NW Spain in an area with only cable-on-poles telephones, consequently we could only get less than 2MB/sec on broadband so we contracted to get (they promised!) 12MB from a company called Eurona anyone have experience of them?

So far the results have been poor and I would like to have a means of accurately measuring what we're really getting. Are broadband test sites like Speed test.com suitable?

I tried to use test my.net but when it went to the Download test page an error came up - site not obtainable - no doubt it's me doing something wrong, but I am a bit lost and could use some help please.

[Pgoodwin1]

What TestMy.net test server are you trying to connect to? Link is in upper right of home page.

[RayArdia]

Oh yes, I see I've been trying to connect to Dallas! Not a good idea! What should I do?

After note. Tried Frankfurt and London same result 'site could not be reached'.

Edited September 27, 2016 by RayArdia
Addition of an afternote

[mudmanc4]

@RayArdia, if you are familiar with the ping and tracrt command in a windows command line, run both to testmy.net (assuming your running windows)

 

Start/ orb, or whatever version of windows you might be running > type in 'cmd' without the ticks, then:

tracrt testmy.net

 

And to ping:

ping testmy.net

Please copy and paste the output of each here.

[Sean]

One possibility is that the satellite provider is using a cache proxy that is interfering with the speed test.  For example, some satellite proxies try caching the whole page before sending the lot in one chunk over the satellite.  This reduces the time a page takes to load as the individual page element requests (for images, javascript, css files, etc.) are intercepted and served by the satellite modem. 

 

As the TestMy download test is effectively one huge webpage, what's probably happening is that the satellite provider is trying to prefetch it and chocking on the size, particularly if it goes on to let's say 20+MB blocks that would be unusually large for a webpage.  I've seen this issue also happen with transparent proxies such as Fiddler.

 

What you can try is running a test with the HTTPS website https://testmy.net/download  You will need to accept the security certificate warning that appears as the site uses a self-signed certificate. 

 

If that does not work, you can try downloading the '100mb' test block from http://mirror.leaseweb.com/speedtest/ (don't use the Microsoft Edge browser) and see what the download speed settles around during the test.  Multiply this figure by 8 to convert the speed into Mbps.  For example, if you get a download speed of 1.5MB/s, then 1.5 x 8 = 12Mbps. 

[Heliodoro]

Hello to all. I am located in Orihuela Costa (Alicante) and have problems to find a reliable Internet provider. I tried Eurona, Ole, Movistar and now I,ve installed SkyDsl it worked fine first 2 months but now I fell a sleep waiting for videos on youtube. I checked with testmy.net and SkyDsl results are 1.3Mb in good conditions, compared to the link they send me to check the system http:// checkportal.skylogicnet.com fake results are between 18 and 23Mb ! 

[Pgoodwin1]

22 hours ago, Heliodoro said:

Hello to all. I am located in Orihuela Costa (Alicante) and have problems to find a reliable Internet provider. I tried Eurona, Ole, Movistar and now I,ve installed SkyDsl it worked fine first 2 months but now I fell a sleep waiting for videos on youtube. I checked with testmy.net and SkyDsl results are 1.3Mb in good conditions, compared to the link they send me to check the system http:// checkportal.skylogicnet.com fake results are between 18 and 23Mb ! 

Keep calling them about the problem. Be polite, but be persistent.

[Pgoodwin1]

By the way, you live in a beautiful area