Ookla's handy tools gauge broadband speeds

If you buy a gallon of gas, you can be pretty confident you're getting a full gallon.

But if you're paying $50 a month for 12 megabits-per-second broadband, figuring out exactly what you're getting can be tricky.

Broadband speeds vary depending on lots of factors, and there's no standard way to measure them.

A handful of companies offer measurement tools, but they use different approaches, get different results and don't all share the data.

"They all say they're measuring speed but in fact they have a lot of different ways of doing it," said Steve Bauer, an MIT researcher who co-wrote a June paper on the situation.

Bauer argues that it's time to move toward a "collective agreement on best practices." His paper predicts that as broadband generally gets faster, we'll move away from focusing mostly on speed and develop a more "nuanced" characterization of broadband quality, paying more attention to issues such as reliability and latency, or lag time.

In other words, once speeds get to a certain level, we'll stop worrying so much about megabits per second and focus more on the lag when you're videoconferencing or playing a game.

You'd think broadband speeds would be straightforward, like the speed of a car. Broadband companies make it seem simple, promising specific speeds, although they couch it by saying they'll deliver "up to" those speeds.

Even more disconcerting: While there's no consensus on how to measure current speeds, the federal government is planning to spend billions improving broadband, an effort it calls "the great infrastructure challenge of the 21st century."

One bright spot in this fog is a tiny Seattle broadband-measurement company called Ookla. It has a strange name but a good approach to testing, using multiple connections at once to nearby servers.

Bauer's report said Ookla's Speedtest.net is "the best of the currently available data sources for assessing the speed of ISP's broadband-access service."

That may change later this year when the Federal Communications Commission begins testing speeds with devices it's installing in 10,000 homes across the country. But that won't provide everyone the instant measurement available from tools such as Ookla's.

More than a million people a day are now using its free testing tool, offered at Speedtest.net, which has handled more than 1.5 billion tests since it started in 2006.

Ookla's tools are also being used by nine of out 10 Internet service providers in the country. The privately held business has grown at about 5 percent a month for the last three years, according to Chief Executive Mike Apgar.

The tools were built at Speakeasy, the Seattle broadband company that Apgar co-founded in 1994 and sold to Best Buy for $97 million in 2007.

Before the sale, Apgar spun out Ookla — named for a co-founder's cantankerous cat — and started running it as a separate company with a few employees in Seattle. He moved to his native Kalispell, Mont., where he leads what's now a nine-person business.

Apgar said the idea behind Speakeasy — to provide faster, high-quality Internet service — is also behind Ookla. But instead of providing service directly, Ookla offers a tool that helps people get what they pay for, and holds broadband providers accountable.

He's also providing researchers and others access to Ookla's huge collection of data, to help analyze broadband speeds and service.

For instance, Ookla provided me an analysis of Seattle-area broadband service that shows speeds vary throughout the day.

The speed of Comcast service, in particular, declines as the day progresses, reaching its slowest point in the evenings during prime TV-viewing time.

Asked about the situation, Comcast executives acknowledged there are variations in speed. They said the company has been spending millions to keep upgrading its network.

Comcast also is segmenting its traffic so that heavy TV traffic won't bog down its broadband speeds. But that gets tricky now that people are increasingly getting their evening video fix by streaming content over broadband from sites like YouTube, Netflix and Hulu.

"We spend a lot of money trying to stay on top of this," said Steve Taber, vice president of engineering for Comcast in Washington, which has nearly 900,000 broadband customers.

Taber said the company does get occasional complaints about speed but the Seattle market gets relatively few service calls compared with the rest of the industry.

"By and large we're doing a very good job keeping up with it," he said.

Qwest and Clearwire's speeds were more steady during the day, perhaps because they're not used as much by people streaming video at home.

Ookla's data don't show whether speeds are falling below what customers are paying for. To figure that out at home, you'll have to run a few tests of your own.

With more data available, variations in speed through the day could become another way we evaluate broadband. But congestion effects are inevitable on a shared network, Bauer said.

"It's like rush hour with traffic," he said. "If you try to drive when everyone else is driving, you're going to go a little bit slower."

Brier Dudley's column appears Mondays. Reach him at 206-515-5687 or bdudley@seattletimes.com.