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I am not sure why this old news is surfacing here today but I can give my 2 cents, since I sold speedchecker.com last year and were directly competing with Ookl
by forcer 4mo ago
I am not sure why this old news is surfacing here today but I can give my 2 cents, since I sold speedchecker.com last year and were directly competing with Ookla.
The main business is selling the data. You use Speedtest.net to troubleshoot your connection but metrics captured with the test alongside location data give telcos invaluable insights on where they should improve their networks. Telcos pay 6 figures annually for this data and we have a few hundreds of of those big MNOs globally. This market is pretty big. Accenture is in trouble with their main consulting business due to AI so acquiring data business is one of the smart strategies they can implement to stay relevant.
To all commenters who think they can code it over the weekend, yes you are right. I coded my first speed checker over the weekend in 2008 but it took me 18 years to grow the user base , figure out entreprise sales strategy and exit. Its not easy as it seems.
- Melatonic 4mo agoAny recommendations for similar tools to check network metrics other than speed ? Used to be a few free ones but would be nice to have an easy one to use
- esseph 4mo agoMost will show you speed / latency / packetloss with the toggleable option for multi-single threaded. What would you like to see?
- aryehof 4mo ago> Accenture is in trouble with their main consulting business due to AI Is this something being seen across all outsourcers like Accenture, Wipro, Infosys etc?
- dgellow 4mo agoMNOs => Mobile Network Operators
- contingencies 4mo agoJust wanted to say congratulations!
- saidnooneever 4mo agothanks fornthe insights. inthought it was a wopping number but this makes totally sense. never realised this was gather valuable data for network operators. cool insights!
- AndrewKemendo 4mo agoWhy did you sell it?
- andix 4mo agoThe partner network of Speedtest is also impressive. I don't know how many speed tests they need to handle in parallel, but usually it's always enough to do speed tests up to 5-10 Gbit/s. With more and more fiber connections also latency becomes very relevant. Otherwise the tests would be meaningless. Speedtest manages to measure less than 1ms latency on my fiber connection.
- forcer 4mo agoOnce you have a good amount of users testing, its not that difficult to get free servers from the ISPs. The secret is that on-net servers show testers better performance than off-net so every ISP wants to contribute the speed test server. If they dont do it they are shooting themselves in the foot by routing their traffic to competitor networks and getting test results behind their peers. Whats even worst then your competitors can claim awards for the Fastest ISP and your marketing people are furious!
- andix 4mo agoSure, but it's still a huge effort to set up all those partnerships and keep them alive. ISPs are often traditional and slow moving companies, it probably takes a lot of work to get those servers in place at the right locations.
- mapBasketWand 4mo agoThat was a persistent conversation with ISPs when I was building a white label WiFi product (competitor to Eero). Some ISPs wanted us to pin to their servers in our app to have the best possible results (we refused) while others wanted us to use their servers because they offered 10G service and none of the other servers had that much throughout. So their true 10G line would be limited by the server, not the line.
- bigfatkitten 4mo agoAnd some cheeky traffic shaping by your competitors to make your results look worse than they should be.
- frankdenbow 4mo agowhat was the point where you had enough data to make it worthwhile for telcos?
- cortesoft 4mo agoAs someone who worked at a CDN for years, I imagine the code is the easiest technical part. Managing the infrastructure, network connectivity, load balancing, and capacity planning would be the harder parts, outside of the sales and marketing bits. If you don’t get all of those parts right, you are going to end up measuring your own bandwidth rather than the client’s.
- ksec 4mo agoThis. The website, and backend code for the test. 10% of the software work. Which is what everyone seems to think. The code to managing the infrastructure, network connectivity, load balancing, and capacity planning is the 90% of the software part. But even then it is only 10% of the technical thing. Getting all the ISP onboard to have your server in their network / exchange and to deal with you, takes more time and effort then all the software part. But even then it is only 10% of the project. The remaining 90%? Non technical part for Sales and Marketing and getting user traction. To put that into perspective, the website can be done in a weekend was only 0.01% of the work.
- Raed667 4mo agoHow come ISPs aren't providing that data internally from observing their own traffic ?
- k2enemy 4mo agoI'm sure they do, but data about the speeds of other ISPs is also valuable.
- hocuspocus 4mo agoI'm not sure about broadband data, as it can't be that useful. However on the mobile side, it's fairly valuable as a mobile app can collect A-GPS location and sensor telemetry that are unknown to the MNO otherwise.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- _fizz_buzz_ 4mo agoWhen you first built it, were you aware there was market for the data? Or was this something you discovered afterwards? It makes sense, but I wouldn’t have guessed it.
- athrowaway3z 4mo agoDid you ever fear that any big player like Google, Apple, Valve (though fewer mobiles), Meta, OpenAI (nowadays), etc decide to get involved?
- qsxfthnkp2322 4mo agoApple has their own internal speed app due to privacy concerns.
- qsxfthnkp2322 4mo agohttps://theapplewiki.com/wiki/Speed https://theapplewiki.com/wiki/Speed
- kalleboo 4mo agoAnd on macOS Apple has `networkQuality` on the command line which runs a speed test against presumably the iCloud servers
- qsxfthnkp2322 4mo agoGotta collect that data on how the services perform. lol Snark aside, at least they have tight data controls and don’t sell that information. But I don’t really have a lot of faith in the whole story and/or some of the management inside. Yeah there usually is always two sides to the coin. But tbh It’s too secretive. There has to be something there outside of simply “protecting the surprise.”
- guessmyname 4mo agoNot iCloud servers per se, but close: • ussea4-edge-fx-012.aaplimg.com • mensura.cdn-apple.com/api/v1/gm/large
- arikrahman 4mo agoAll it takes to defeat the business model is https://openspeedtest.com/ https://openspeedtest.com/
- mbesto 4mo agoOr https://speed.cloudflare.com/ https://speed.cloudflare.com/
- swiftcoder 4mo agoCloudflare's undercounts my download by 25% and my upload by 75% (versus both speedtest.net and my observed sustained data rates). Also reports double the latency.
- mbesto 4mo agoUndercounts it by what barometer?
- swiftcoder 4mo agoVersus versus my own measurement of sustained download/upload rates (this isn't rocket science - upload a 1 GB file to S3, download it again, time both). speedtest.net is within ~5% of my own test results, cloudflare isn't even in the ballpark.
- arikrahman 4mo agoMoving from one proprietary solution to another defeats the purpose. That's why I linked a FOSS solution. The repo is here https://github.com/openspeedtest/Speed-Test https://github.com/openspeedtest/Speed-Test
- jedberg 4mo agoThat test was totally inaccurate for me. It got the download right but upload was only 1/12 of my rated speed and 1/12 of what all the other tests (and my actual experience) tell me.
- altairprime 4mo agoIt’s less than ninety days old and it isn’t (2025), so I wouldn’t consider this as ‘old news’ yet. TIL, for example! But if you think it’s a dupe/repost and should be squashed, email the mods a link to both this and the prior post so they can evaluate.
- rajveerb 4mo ago@forcer would love to know how you "grow the user base , figure out entreprise sales strategy and exit"
- steve_adams_86 4mo agoApparently it takes roughly the same amount of time as raising a child
- rajveerb 4mo agohaha sounds like it.
- mbesto 4mo ago> but it took me 18 years to grow the user base , figure out entreprise sales strategy and exit. The audience here has never wanted to admit that the codebase doesn't really matter. Now that codebases can be created in a weekend, people are opening their eyes to this sentiment - the hard part is the sales, the code is easy.
- themafia 4mo ago> The audience here has never wanted to admit that the codebase doesn't really matter. Are we talking about speed testing websites or the code that controls space vehicles? Perhaps extreme generalities do not provide useful insights. > Now that codebases can be created in a weekend Now that corporations are whitewashing copyright off of code so you can steal it without conscience. > people are opening their eyes to this sentiment Code is the product. Engineering is the discipline. That you can achieve high sales without good engineering is not a new idea. That it only provides short term benefits and leaves you irrelevant in the long term is the actual sentiment. > the code is easy. Coding has been easy since Perl was released. Knowing _what_ to code is the problem.
- bigfatkitten 4mo ago> Engineering is the discipline. And even that is very rare in the field of software development.
- BoggleOhYeah 4mo agoI'm not sure anyone was operating under the idea that a speed test website's code was the hard part.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 4mo ago[flagged]
- elxr 4mo agoGreat code is still not easy. Choosing the right stack/libraries/billing and getting everything to work together (for cheap) is still something barely 10% of devs can actually realistically do. Sales is hard, yeah, but look at everyone claiming to be building something amazing and it ends up 9 months behind schedule or just being an buggy, untested version of something that already exists in the market.
- taneq 4mo ago> I coded my first speed checker over the weekend in 2008 but it took me 18 years to grow the user base , figure out entreprise sales strategy and exit. Its not easy as it seems. The biggest surprise (imo) when you start a business is how little of running a business is actually directly about the product. Having a product is essential, sure, and having a good product is nice, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
- glaslong 4mo ago> To all commenters who think they can code it over the weekend, yes you are right... but it took me 18 years to grow the user base I should get this printed and framed
- brikym 4mo agoAre you able to share the details on how it was valued? Was it N times revenue or anything like that? I have tried to value a property several parties are interested in and found it quite mysterious.
- iugtmkbdfil834 4mo agoThank you for your service ( the product was/is -- haven't used in a while -- useful ). I think this is the part that people do not appreciate. Sometimes it genuinely it is not the difficulty of the task from a pure programming perspective, but 1) getting the users and 2) getting people to pay for the service and 3) getting the right people to sign off on that. It is very similar in banking. The products themselves are not super hard ( though the challenges are real ), buy just getting to talk to the right people is a hassle.
- 8cvor6j844qw_d6 4mo agoISP seems to give higher network priority to Ookla so I'm not sure how useful it is compared to actual experience.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- NetMageSCW 4mo agoLike all speed tests it should be considered the maximum you can achieve.
- PunchyHamster 4mo agoHuh, interesting, I thought ISP would get enough metrics from their own devices
- ricardobayes 4mo agoTelcos wanting to improve their networks is news to me. I always thought providing the bare minimum is basically their business model.
- zulban 4mo agoProviding the bare minimum when you're not is improving. ;)
- hbwang2076 4mo agoSolid point on the infrastructure testing gap. Accenture/ookla collaboration is interesting - real world speed data meets enterprise rollout.