Folks, today I was sad to read a series of posts that led to the topic being locked - and some of the comments deleted. It all came down to the insinuation that results from our favourite (or the most used by our geeks around) broadband speed test was being influenced by the ISP sponsoring the test.

The suggestion was that people connecting from ISPs sponsoring the test would get better results than people connecting from other ISPs.

To make things clear I contacted Ookla, the company behind the speed test site, and received the following reply:

"Sponsored By" just means that the server and bandwidth are being provided by that company. They are not paying to be on the Speedtest.net map.

However - since Ookla's core business is the licensing of our software - when one of our customers requests to be on Speedtest.net in place of someone who is not a customer... we usually honor that request. We will only let it happen though if the server ends up performing as well or better than the existing host. I am guessing this request is related to ihug (an Ookla customer) recently becoming the Auckland testing host...

The ihug server performed very well for their own customers but did not for others. I would have noticed this last week and resolved it sooner had I not been out of town. Things are now setup so that all ihug customers see their server, but everyone else sees another server which should perform much better for them. This is based on actual test results (we look through them all periodically to make sure servers are performing properly compared to others in the same region).

Our goal is to make sure that the best possible server is available in each city for testing. We encourage users to contact us anytime they think there is an issue with a server. They would likely notice it a bit sooner than we will.