alt Hacker NewsI am not sure why this old news is surfacing here today but I can give my 2 cents, since I sold speedchecker.com last year and were directly competing with Ookla.
The main business is selling the data. You use Speedtest.net to troubleshoot your connection but metrics captured with the test alongside location data give telcos invaluable insights on where they should improve their networks. Telcos pay 6 figures annually for this data and we have a few hundreds of of those big MNOs globally. This market is pretty big. Accenture is in trouble with their main consulting business due to AI so acquiring data business is one of the smart strategies they can implement to stay relevant.
To all commenters who think they can code it over the weekend, yes you are right. I coded my first speed checker over the weekend in 2008 but it took me 18 years to grow the user base , figure out entreprise sales strategy and exit. Its not easy as it seems.
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> but it took me 18 years to grow the user base , figure out entreprise sales strategy and exit.
The audience here has never wanted to admit that the codebase doesn't really matter. Now that codebases can be created in a weekend, people are opening their eyes to this sentiment - the hard part is the sales, the code is easy.
The partner network of Speedtest is also impressive. I don't know how many speed tests they need to handle in parallel, but usually it's always enough to do speed tests up to 5-10 Gbit/s. With more and more fiber connections also latency becomes very relevant. Otherwise the tests would be meaningless. Speedtest manages to measure less than 1ms latency on my fiber connection.
When you first built it, were you aware there was market for the data? Or was this something you discovered afterwards? It makes sense, but I wouldn’t have guessed it.
It’s less than ninety days old and it isn’t (2025), so I wouldn’t consider this as ‘old news’ yet. TIL, for example! But if you think it’s a dupe/repost and should be squashed, email the mods a link to both this and the prior post so they can evaluate.
How come ISPs aren't providing that data internally from observing their own traffic ?
Telcos wanting to improve their networks is news to me. I always thought providing the bare minimum is basically their business model.
Thank you for your service ( the product was/is -- haven't used in a while -- useful ).
I think this is the part that people do not appreciate. Sometimes it genuinely it is not the difficulty of the task from a pure programming perspective, but 1) getting the users and 2) getting people to pay for the service and 3) getting the right people to sign off on that.
It is very similar in banking. The products themselves are not super hard ( though the challenges are real ), buy just getting to talk to the right people is a hassle.
ISP seems to give higher network priority to Ookla so I'm not sure how useful it is compared to actual experience.
@forcer would love to know how you "grow the user base , figure out entreprise sales strategy and exit"
thanks fornthe insights. inthought it was a wopping number but this makes totally sense. never realised this was gather valuable data for network operators. cool insights!
Are you able to share the details on how it was valued? Was it N times revenue or anything like that? I have tried to value a property several parties are interested in and found it quite mysterious.
Any recommendations for similar tools to check network metrics other than speed ? Used to be a few free ones but would be nice to have an easy one to use
> Accenture is in trouble with their main consulting business due to AI
Is this something being seen across all outsourcers like Accenture, Wipro, Infosys etc?
MNOs => Mobile Network Operators
> To all commenters who think they can code it over the weekend, yes you are right... but it took me 18 years to grow the user base
I should get this printed and framed
Did you ever fear that any big player like Google, Apple, Valve (though fewer mobiles), Meta, OpenAI (nowadays), etc decide to get involved?
> I coded my first speed checker over the weekend in 2008 but it took me 18 years to grow the user base , figure out entreprise sales strategy and exit. Its not easy as it seems.
The biggest surprise (imo) when you start a business is how little of running a business is actually directly about the product. Having a product is essential, sure, and having a good product is nice, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
what was the point where you had enough data to make it worthwhile for telcos?
All it takes to defeat the business model is https://openspeedtest.com/
Huh, interesting, I thought ISP would get enough metrics from their own devices
Just wanted to say congratulations!
As someone who worked at a CDN for years, I imagine the code is the easiest technical part. Managing the infrastructure, network connectivity, load balancing, and capacity planning would be the harder parts, outside of the sales and marketing bits.
If you don’t get all of those parts right, you are going to end up measuring your own bandwidth rather than the client’s.