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Hello Tom, welcome to SG. What is your ISP's advertised speed?
The connection speed is measured between your PC/Modem, through your ISP with a number of hops, their backbones, through our ISP's interchange/peering connections, to our test servers. This usually takes several "hops" through different shared devices/routers/switches, etc.
It is not only dependent on your own end PC/modem, but also on all those other factors/devices, and how congested they are at that particular moment, you are measuring your speed to that particular location, it is relative, not an "absolute" speed. It measures the speed between two points on the Internet by trying to simulate real-world traffic (dependent on every node in between).
In addition, different speed tests are designed differently, for example ours opens 4-5 simultaneous "streams" to fill up your line to simulate actual transfers. Other sites may use from one to 20 streams, depending on their own implementation. That usually causes huge variations of the reported "speed", we try to simulate real-world transfer speed between those two points.
There are other factors at play, usually ISP's oversubscribe the same available bandwidth 20+ times, so there may be slowdowns at peak times (when doing transfers outside your local ISP area). The reported "speed" between your ISP and your PC will almost always be higher than if you are going to a distant server hosted by another company.
I hope this helps clear those differences.
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