FCC Offers a “Free” Broadband Speedchecker
We’re not used to freebies from the FCC, but they just offered up a broadband Speedchecker to see how your carrier is performing. Get it here.
Nothing’s really free from the FCC, of course. The Speedchecker is a Trojan horse. Before you can run it, you have to give up personal address information, presumably to allow them to assess the state of U.S. broadband. For those finicky about doing this, the form seems insensitive to data errors, or even strings of random letters and numbers. Hope this doesn’t constitute lying to the feds! We don’t advocate this. Of course.
Furthermore, each time you run the test, you must reenter the data and endure the privacy notices. Still, the test does seem complete, giving uplink and downlink speeds, latency, and jitter – important stuff if you’re streaming or doing VoIP.
However, you might just want to go to Speedtest and spare yourself the FCC hassles. It uses the same OOKLA engine as the FCC and lets you choose servers. The only thing you don’t get is “Jitter.”
If you do try out the FCC Speedchecker, be sure to let us know your results with a comment. Do you believe they are accurate?
Visit devlbagroup.com to see the range of services LBA offers the broadband community.
