Sometimes, when one is out and about, on a public network, it's nice to see what kind of throughput your iPhone or iPod touch is getting on Wi-Fi. The Speed Test app from Ookla is the little brother of the well known Speedtest.net Website that Apple recommends for evaluating your Network's speed. It works very well.

The operation is simple. Make sure you're connected to a Wi-Fi network and launch the speed test. Because the iPhone and iPod touch uses 802.11g (and the less often used 802.11b), speeds will fall into the nominal range for the typical "g" network. That's a theoretical peak of 54 Mbps but a lot, lot less in practice.

The Main Panel

Not only was I curious about the speed of my iPhone 3G, I was also curious about the speed of the iPhone relative to my MacBook Pro. Here is the speed test on the MacBook with Safari immediately following, using www.speedtest.net

Same Test (almost) on MacBook

So it looks like, for at least this test, at the same distance from my AirPort base station, on the "g" network the iPhone is somewhat slower. That could be due to the iPhone's smaller antenna and power and the fact that I couldn't specify the city for the iPhone app. All this introduces variation.

Operation

The speedtest app for the iPhone has three major panels.

1. The main panel: test the network speed (shown above).
2. Settings: one can specify the format of the speed and how the history is sorted, a display of both the LAN and WAN IP addresses, and an estimated LAT/LON from the IP address (shown below)
3. A history log of the results and date stamp.

Settings Panel (Some Data Obscured)

The app has a great analog display of the up and down speeds. (In my case, Comcast has a cap of 1 Mbps for uploads.) The one major drawback is that one cannot specify the distant city for the test -- as one can do with the Website via a browser. And if you try to access www.speedtest.net via Safari on the iPhone, the Website will detect the Agent ID and redirect you to the iPhone app, preventing equivalent testing.

I can see the app being useful for diagnostic purposes by technicians, tests of Wi-Fi public networks when a second data point is needed (and the hotel manager is making excuses), and household diagnostics regarding the placement of Wi-Fi base stations.

Best of all, it's free.