How do I find my users' connection speed?

Web Performance Testing Tools/Services
1

Connection speed configuration has a big effect on webpagetest results.

Where can I find the best connection speed numbers to simulate my users? Google Analytics used to provide this info, but ditched it when they added Real User Monitoring.

If there’s nothing easy/comparable to the old GA, does anyone maintain a table of typical connection speeds per country?

2

This may help: http://calendar.perfplanet.com/2012/using-rum-to-calibrate-your-synthetic-testing/

It becomes a bit of trial and error to get it set up right but there aren’t good sources of bandwidth and latency numbers (and it varies quite widely from site to site).

3

Brian

Really helpful - thanks for precogniting such an insightful article.

Next steps as I dig deeper into the problem:

  • is there any pattern to filtering out “bad” RUM results from GA? Can I cut off data over say 10 secs as being due to unrelated issues?
  • does choosing a synthetic speed target between 55% and 70% of the log normal come from gut or stats?
  • how important is nailing the target (vs. just multiplying by an appropriate factor)?
  • how important is nailing the factor with one profile (vs blend of multiple connection speeds)?

I’m not looking to overcomplicate the process - I want to use as many shortcuts as possible, but also understand the cost to accuracy.

Thanks,
Mike