How fast is your internet?

Advertised speeds are the maximum of the line, measured under ideal conditions with no other traffic. Real results are always lower because some bandwidth is used by your router, Wi-Fi, the TV streaming in the background, the VPN you're connected to, and by the fact that the internet is a shared network that peaks at different times.

As a rule of thumb, a healthy result lands at 80–95% of the advertised number on Ethernet, and noticeably lower on Wi-Fi.

Use Ethernet for the most accurate reading. Wi-Fi shares airtime with every other device on the network, and 2.4 GHz bands are especially susceptible to interference from neighbouring networks.

If you must use Wi-Fi, stand close to the router, use the 5 GHz or 6 GHz band, and close other devices that are streaming or downloading.

Jitter is the variation in your latency. Imagine a ping of 20 ms that never changes: that's steady. Now imagine a ping that jumps between 5 ms and 90 ms: the average might still look fine, but every second of a video call stutters and online games rubber-band.

For calls and gaming, jitter matters more than the average ping. Under 10 ms is excellent, under 30 ms is fine.

Mbps means megabits per second — a measure of how much data moves each second. One megabit is roughly 125 KB, so 100 Mbps downloads about 12.5 MB per second.

As a rough guide: 5 Mbps handles one HD stream, 25 Mbps handles a 4K stream plus browsing, 100 Mbps comfortably covers a busy household, and 300 Mbps or more matters if you work from home, game competitively, or upload large files.

Start with the boring stuff: connect by Ethernet, move closer to the router, use the 5 GHz band, and reboot the router to clear any degraded state. Then close apps that sync in the background — cloud backups, video calls and large downloads all compete for the same pipe.

Also check that your device isn't the bottleneck: old Wi-Fi cards, USB network adapters and power-saving modes on the Wi-Fi radio all cap you well below what the line can deliver.

Cloudflare routes each request to its nearest data centre — an "edge" location. The results panel shows which one answered, and the distance to it, so you can tell whether latency reflects a busy local network or a genuinely distant server.