Welcome to the newly improved Oz Broadband Speed Test
Welcome to the newly improved Oz Broadband Speed Test. I hope you all enjoy the new site, and I will explain some of the changes.
Firstly you have almost certainly noticed the new design. The site was in desperate need of a face lift. I have tested the site with many browsers, and it should work fine with IE6+, Opera, Firefox and Safari to name a few.
Secondly, we are now using a new speed test engine. Each speed test now runs using Adobe Flash player rather than using JavaScript. The reason for the swap was due to inconsistent results with the larger tests (ie 9MB and 15MB) in browsers, especially with slower computers which had trouble rendering such large JPEG’s to the screen. From testing it is safe to conclude that results are far more accurate for users of Cable and ADSL2+.
I have also introduced a news feed, capturing broadband related stories from news outlets across Australia. I hope this is of interest to some users.
Gone for now is the upload test. The old upload test proved not to be very accurate, so I am hoping to revamp the upload mechanism and relaunch in in the coming weeks.
I also plan to implement other new features in the coming weeks, including the ability to comment on news items, graphing of your speed test results, and comparing your connection to other users on the same ISP.
I hope you all enjoy the new site and I will keep you updated as I add new features. If you spot and bugs please let me know and I will rectify any issues as fast as I can.
Jinny, 
benryanau 4:09 pm on April 15, 2009 Permalink
Firstly, thanks Alex for providing this service… good to see people are still seeing the ‘net as something other than a cashcow! Just my AUD$0.02.. I don’t install Flash and neither do many of my customers or friends. Certainly not on servers. The recent change to Flash means your site can’t be used anymore… I would like to plead for the return of at least one legacy link to the old JS-based test! Even if it’s not 100% it gives a basic idea of effective throughput which is usually more than enough. It would be a shame to have to stop using your great resource because of a technology issue 🙁
Alex M 4:19 pm on April 15, 2009 Permalink
Thanks for your feedback benryanau. It’s definitly something that I can look into. Perhaps a link to the old JavaScript version might do the trick if we can’t detect a flash install?
Jinny 1:04 pm on April 16, 2009 Permalink
Super post, Need to mark it on Digg