There are a few ways to find out how fast the broadband from your provider is. Sometimes, lag or a bad Wi-Fi connection can make it hard to watch your home videos or videos from a streaming service.
During these times, it’s a good idea to check if the connection speed you agreed to pay your operator for is what you are actually getting. To help you do this, we’ll show you how to check your Internet speed for free.
You should know that doing a Wi-Fi speed test is not the same as checking your broadband speed, but many apps and people use the two terms interchangeably.
If you try to test your Internet speed over a weak or slow Wi-Fi connection, you might not get a true number, since slow Wi-Fi can slow down your connection.
This is actually a test of the whole connection between your device (a PC, laptop, phone, or tablet) and a server on the Internet. So you are testing both the speed of Wi-Fi and the speed of broadband.
You can also test the speed of your mobile data by running the test on your phone without Wi-Fi. But what if you really want to know how fast your router’s broadband connection is? We tell you how it works.
The speed of the Internet depends on a lot of things. When more than one family member is using Netflix to watch shows and movies at the same time, things can sometimes slow down. If your Wi-Fi connection slows down, you might think it’s the provider’s fault.
If web pages take a long time to load, it could be because you use a VPN. Make sure to turn off any VPNs before testing, unless you want to see how fast your VPN is.
Free Internet Speed Test
Speedtest.net is the service we use to check how fast our broadband is. You can do it from any web browser or by downloading the app for Android or iOS.
With the help of this tool, you can find out how fast your connection is in just one minute. But if you are testing from a device that connects to your router through Wi-Fi, make sure you are close to it.
To rule out a slow Wi-Fi connection, the best way to test is to connect a laptop or PC directly to the router with an Ethernet cable.
You can also use other speed tests, such as Fast.com, test-velocidad.com, mitestdevelocidad.com, and a lot of others. Most of the time, the operators offer these kinds of tools to measure speed.
At the moment, Spain has the fastest broadband, which is 10 Gbps. This is faster than most Wi-Fi routers. But most routers from ISPs will have Wi-Fi speeds that are faster than broadband speeds.
Those that support Wi-Fi 5 should be able to handle between 300 Mbps and 500 Mbps over short distances. Here’s how to speed up Wi-Fi and your home network if you want to see how fast Wi-Fi can work in your home. We also have an article about how to improve your VPN’s Internet connection.
It’s also important to remember that many of the broadband plans offered by operators are asynchronous, which means that the speeds for uploading and downloading content are different.
People talk a lot about download speeds because they are often much faster. On the other hand, upload speeds can be up to 90% slower than download speeds, so it can take a while to upload a video to YouTube.
Also, if your video feed stops during Zoom or Teams video calls, check your upload speed and keep in mind that smart cameras that record to the cloud use some of your bandwidth.
You should also look at the test results for your ping, which are given in milliseconds. This is your connection’s latency. Real-time applications, like network games or video calls, need it. The number should be as low as possible.
Note: Download and upload speeds are measured in Megabits per second (Mbps), not Megabytes per second (MBPS). To go from Megabits per second to Megabytes per second, divide the speed in Megabits per second by 8.
How to test Wi-Fi speed
If your speed test result was slower than you expected and you used a Wi-Fi signal, you can test your Wi-Fi speed separately to see if the problem still exists.
It’s hard to find a Wi-Fi speed test app because a lot of broadband test apps are called “Wi-Fi speed test.”
But there is an Android app called Zoltán Pallagi WiFi Speed Test that lets you turn off the internet and test how fast your local Wi-Fi is without using the internet. It’s not the best interface we’ve seen, but it gets the job done.
This only checks the “upload” speed, which is how fast your phone or tablet can send data to your router or another access point.
Again, the speed will be limited by the slowest device. Your router may be the latest model that supports Wi-Fi 6E, but if your phone doesn’t support the same speed, you’ll only see the speed of the slowest device.
We connected a Huawei P30 Pro (Wi-Fi 5) phone to a Linksys Velop tri-band mesh system to test it. (The connection doesn’t care about the SSID of the carrier’s router so a lot of devices don’t have to be set up again for a new Wi-Fi network.
The download speed of 464 Mbps is very good, and it’s very close to the speed we got from the computer’s broadband connection when we tested it. This means that the Wi-Fi signal doesn’t lose much speed. -Fi.
You can use this app and run it from different rooms and locations in your home to see how speeds change in different places. It helps you figure out where to put your router or signal repeaters so that you can connect all of your Wi-Fi devices in a mesh.
What internet speed do I need for Netflix, Zoom, and online gaming?
If you want to test your broadband speed to see if it’s good enough to do certain things, here are some speeds to think about:
- 1.5 Mbps download for video streaming in standard quality
- 5 Mbps download speed for HD video streaming
- 25 Mbps download speed for 4K video streaming
- 50 Mbps download speed for 8K video streaming (100 Mbps recommended)
- Zoom/Teams video call: download speed of 4 Mbps
Network gaming: 50 ms is ideal, and 100 ms is good enough. Above 150ms, it might not work.
If you’re not happy with the speeds you got from these tools, check out our article about the best deals from phone companies in Spain. In it, we talk about the data plans that the major phone companies in our country offer.
You might also want to find out about the best Wi-Fi routers to improve the Wi-Fi signal in your home.