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DCROWMIK's avatar
DCROWMIK
New Contributor II
7 years ago
Solved

Two Cox Speed Test Sites - What Are the Differences? Why Different Results?

I use both of the Cox internet speed test sites (see below). Whenever a test on each site is done within a minute of each other, both sites REGULARLY show immense differences between reported downloa...
internet
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speed test
  • tonguetwister's avatar
    tonguetwister
    7 years ago

    Cox site #1  https://www.cox.com/residential/support/internet/speedtest.html is a site which does not require Flash to be installed on your computer.

    Cox site #2  https://www.cox.com/internet/speedcheck.cox on the other hand, does require Flash to be installed.

    I'd commented on the above two in a previous post which can be read here (http://forums.cox.com/forum_home/internet_forum/f/5/t/18718.aspx). I have found that despite Cox's claim that their speedtest is based on the Ookla engine, a user is much better off going direct to Ookla, which offers both Flash and non-Flash test sites. Here is the non-Flash one: http://beta.speedtest.net/

    Here is what I'd written in the above-mentioned post: when it was recommended to change to a different browser than my preferred one:

    Following your recommendation I fired up the seldom-used Internet Explorer 11 to test the Cox non-Flash speed test, where it did indeed function. It registered 40 Mbps down/9 Mbps up with 20 ms latency; discouraging, as the Ultimate plan I pay for is 300/30. Also with IE 11 I visited fast.com where I got 200 Mbps download. The most satisfying (albeit temporary) result was at http://beta.speedtest.net, where the results were 386.39/32.07 down/up with a more responsive 8 ms latency score.

    All of these widely varying results should come to no surprise to anyone familiar with speed tests, no matter how disparate they may be.

    The choice is yours but I would suggest the Ookla site over Cox' any day.

DCROWMIK's avatar
DCROWMIK
New Contributor II
7 years ago

Thanks for the answer. After I asked the question I found that with site #1, Cox states that they use speedof.me for that result. Indeed, after going to speedof.me directly I found that both Cox and speedof.me denote the test server as being "Los Angeles 8". When using either Cox's site #1 or speedof.me directly, I've always found those results to be 100-150Mbps slower than what other test sites return. It's interesting Cox uses that site.

As to site #2, yes, I also do see they claim to use Ookla. When I've compared site #2 and Ookla tests, the results generally are within about 10% of each other (e.g. my most recent test showed 370/32 with Cox #2 and 388/31 with Ookla within about 15 minutes of each other).

Thanks for your response.