Speed Test for Android

For starters, the industry-standard unit of measure for “network speed” (never mind that this term is a misnomer) is bps — bits per second, or Kbps, Mbps. It may be not very intuitive for a layman who needs to know how many seconds it will take to send a 10 Mb (Maga byte) attachment, but we buy broadband from ISPs measured in Mbps. 1 Mb/s = 1 Mbps * 8 (there are 8 bits it a byte). The least this program could do is offer to choose the unit of measure I want to see the results shown in and convert them. Further, it’s important to understand how the measurement is performed — what server is my device exchanging data, and how much data is being pushed through to see the maximum that can be transmitted per second, which is the width of the channel, what “network speed” actually means. But if you click on the gear icon, go to User Protocol (whatever this term is supposed to mean) and read “How the Application Works,” try not to loose your head from that description — “when you want to test speed, you send a request to the platform to measure the speed...” something about encryption..., but nothing to let me understand between what and what the data transmission is being conducted and in what amount (the size of the data block) so that measurement can be conducted. And this is important: if you don’t push through at least 100 Mega bits (12.5 Mega bytes), you cannot measure the speed of 100 Mbps. And not knowing with what server the data interchange is taking place, makes knowing the speed quite useless. All websites which I access are not located in the same place, and they certainly not all located on my ISP’s backbone, which is the speed my ISP is selling to me. That’s speaking of Wi-Fi. As far as mobile data speeds, there is even more you need to understand, to be able to use the measurements for any practical purposes.

The platform and the app is so poor, and there is nothing .....