Netflix wants to help you figure out if your ISP is screwing you over

Just because you’re paying your ISP for a certain level of internet speed doesn’t mean you’re actually receiving that level of internet speed, and Netflix has made it ridiculously easy to figure out if your ISP is screwing you over. There are plenty of websites that can measure your internet speed, but Netflix managed to secure the Fast.com domain, and this website is significantly faster and more clutter-free than alternatives like Speedtest.net. The website starts testing as soon as it loads and presents you with your results within a few seconds, and that’s all it takes to determine whether or not you’re actually getting the internet speed you’re paying for.

Now that watching video is one of biggest uses of the web, the speed of your connection has never been more important. To that end, Netflix, one of the primary sources of what the entertainment industry calls over the top (OTT) content, launched a tool on Wednesday that lets you test your Internet speed. This isn’t any old website. The company cleverly managed to snag the most appropriate domain out there: Fast.com. That’s one of the best domain names — for any service — you could possibly have. No technical knowledge is needed. Simply visit Fast.com and the site immediately starts calculating what your current Internet download speed is. Of course, some more experienced Internet users might wonder why the site is so simple in its approach. On the information page, Netflix describes Fast.com as, “a simple-to-use way for consumers to estimate what speed their ISP is providing. It is not a network engineer’s analysis and diagnostic suite.” The site uses Netflix servers to test your download speed and can give you results no matter where you are internationally and no matter which device (desktop or mobile) you use. “This consumer speed test is different than our Netflix ISP Speed Index,” David Fullagar, Netflix’s vice president of content delivery architecture, said in a statement on the company’s website. “Like the cellular data controls we recently introduced, fast.com is another tool consumers can use for greater insight and control of their Internet service.”