cbrookhart Posted May 14, 2015 Share Posted May 14, 2015 I recently took a bus trip and the bus had Wi-Fi although it more like dial-up because it was very slow and had frequent disconnects. In trying to troubleshoot connectivity issues I tried to access speedtest.net, but found it was blocked. Just wondering why a network admin would block access to that site, other than perhaps not wanting to reveal the true connection speed. From a security standpoint, of there an issue with accessing speedtest.net on a public wireless? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brian M. Veteran Posted May 14, 2015 Veteran Share Posted May 14, 2015 The biggest reason I'd say is if bandwidth is limited (either in speed or cost), you don't really want users downloading relatively large amounts of data for the purpose of telling them that the connection is crap (which they probably already knew). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+John Teacake MVC Posted May 18, 2015 MVC Share Posted May 18, 2015 It might reveal information about the ISP. Public IP Address etc. iogbrideau 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
[ucw]prophet Posted May 18, 2015 Share Posted May 18, 2015 It's smart to block speed test sites in a shared environment. A speed test site is designed to do one thing: saturate the available amount of bandwidth that you have on a network to determine how fast it is. If you have only a single user on that network, you're going to get a reasonable idea of the total amount of bandwidth available. However, once you add two or more people, the result you get back will not be accurate because the other individuals are using the same shared bandwidth. Additionally, once you saturate the Internet pipe with a speed test, it will result in a poor Internet experience for others on the network. So, what do others sharing the same network do? They run a speed test to see what the bandwidth looks like. It's just a cascading failure from that point forward. A smart network admin will block traffic to any resource will will limit the overall bandwidth usage on a shared pipe to ensure quality. That, and enable QoS (quality of service) to ensure Web traffic will have priority over any kind of streaming traffic. And regarding blocking ISP information, there's really no way to prevent that. You can easily go to a Web site to get your IP address and do a IP WHOIS lookup to find the ISP within seconds. Companies who own IPs are registered to ARIN, so it's pretty easy to find out who owns what. Hope this helps. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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