Ookla Bring New Features to Internet Speedtest and Downdetector App

Network testing firm Ookla has released an updated version of their popular broadband performance testing Speedtest.net app (Android and iOS), which further improves integration with their popular internet outage monitoring service (Downdetector) and adds new Experience Ratings to their speed tester.

The biggest change, in our opinion, is that Ookla has finally integrated a feature that we’ve been wanting for a while – the ability for registered users of the service to create a ‘Favourites‘ list under the Downdetector tab. This means you can finally select which internet content or network providers to monitor and get alerts when problems occur – as opposed to the old and laborious way of individually having to manually search or scroll for the ones you want.

The Speedtest side of things has also added ‘Experience Ratings‘, which attempts to give less technically minded users a better indication of how their internet connection performs in other real-world situations by categorising the performance via different measures for: Web Browsing, Video Streaming, Online Gaming, and Video Calling.

For example, the ‘Online Gaming’ measure will place greater emphasis on good upload speeds and the lowest latency (ping) times, which is expressed through five coloured dots (green, orange and yellow). Securing five green dots thus denotes excellent performance in the rating category, but it’s unclear why it’s necessary to have five dots instead of simply using a single coloured dot for each grade. The lack of detail here is also a bit irritating, but this is still considered a beta feature.

Finally, Ookla has added a ‘Compare Your Speeds‘ feature (currently only seems to work for users in the USA), which helps you find the best broadband and mobile providers. After taking a Speedtest, users can now scroll down to see how your network’s results compare with other ISPs in your area. The catch is that the local speeds will reflect an average from all the users of each provider, so it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison (this could be misleading).