How Fast Your Connection - This Flash Does It Right

Posted by Charles | August 22, 2007 .

I can’t think of a better tool to do this job, real time network speed test, than using a RIA platform such as Flash, as this site does. I’m sure you can find (or have used) quite some speed test tools. It’s around since the day one. One problem persist is that the speed counting is not in real time and the result sometime contains the latency occurred at the server. Ideally the speed test processing is happening at the browser. HTML won’t cut it. AJAX (Javascript) might do that job but it’s not visual enough to be appealing.

Once you are on Speedtest.net, it will suggest a server on the map. Just click it and the test starts. Not only that, after the testing, you can get a Flash report comparing the speed with users in other countries. Its counter shows that they’ve tested more than 175 millions connection already. Just think about it, the vast amount of the speed data that associates with location and other demographic information could becoming a great data gold mine. Amazing a simple idea developed as simple tool with a right technology can have such a good potential.

flashnettest How Fast Your Connection - This Flash Does It Right