About Speed of Bits

The shape, not just the number

Every speed test hands you a download figure. Almost none of them tell you the thing that actually explains your day.

Your download speed is rarely the problem. The problems people notice — the video call that freezes the moment you start talking, the backup that never finishes, the file that takes ten minutes to send — are almost always upload problems. And upload is the number every speed test buries beneath the big one.

What we do differently

Speed of Bits draws both directions on a single shared scale. Download rises above the centre line; upload falls below it. Neither half is rescaled to flatter itself. If your download is twelve times your upload, the picture shows that gap at true size — and names what kind of connection that makes you.

Then it remembers. Your last twenty results are kept in your own browser, so the next time you visit you can see whether your line is quietly getting worse. That is the question people are really asking when they run a speed test twice, and no major speed test answers it without an account.

How it is built

• No advertising. Nothing on this page is trying to sell you a router.
• No cookies, no analytics, no tracking. There is nothing to accept and nothing to decline.
• No account. Open the page and the test is already running.
• Your history stays yours. It lives in your browser and is never sent anywhere.
• One file. The whole tool is a single HTML page with no external requests, so it has finished loading before a heavier site has finished fetching its fonts.

Honesty about accuracy

A speed test is a measurement, not a verdict. It tells you what one connection achieved against one server at one moment. Wi-Fi, your router, the age of your device and the hour of the evening all move the number. Run it a few times, over a cable where you can, and trust the pattern rather than any single result.

That is precisely why we keep a history. One number is an anecdote. Twenty is evidence.