Internet speed test guide: Improve your internet connection with the Google Home app (2024)

Improve your internet connection

Follow the steps to improve your mesh connection, increase your internet speeds, and make your internet more consistent throughout your home.

Test your internet speed

1. Open the Google Home app.
2. Tap Favorites WifiNetwork performance Run speed test.

Say "Hey Google, what's my internet speed?"

Available with Nest Wifi or Google Wifi in the Home app. Learn more about setting up Voice Match and controlling your devices by voice.

• Try to run a speed test again. Slow results can be due to congestion on your ISP’s network or on the internet, which are most crowded during peak hours like dinnertime. When networks get crowded, data gets slowed down.
• Turn off Priority device. Priority device reserves bandwidth for the prioritized device and will result in slower network check results.
• Perform a mesh test and check if there are issues with your network.
• Check with your ISP if there are any outages or issues with their internet service.

To calculate your download speed, the Google Homeapp measures how much data your router or primary Wifi point can send and receive from Google’s servers in a given amount of time. We believe that testing speed against a popularserver such asYouTubeinstead of the closest one provides a truer measure of normal, everyday internet use.

For example, if your download speed is 45 Mbps, that means:

45 megabits of data can be transferred in one second from YouTube's servers to your home.

Note:

• Any speed test is just asnapshot of your download speed, which depends on when and where you use the internet. You might not have the same speed for everything you do online.
• Your network's bandwidth could be throttled. Bandwidth throttling is an intentional limitation sometimes employed by ISPs to limit the download speed on a network to regulate network traffic and try to manage network congestion. If YouTube traffic is regulated, it can impact Google Home app speed test results.
• Network congestion isa factor. Depending on what you’re doing, when you’re doing it and what other people on the internet are doing, your download speed could potentially be higher or lower than your speed results.

Most online speed tests check for speeds between your personal devices and a server. But these results will vary depending on two factors:

1. Your location
2. The location of the server

Some tests automatically select the closest server to you, while others let you select from a list of several servers.

Either way, one thing’s for sure: distance matters. Test against a server that’s close to you and the results will be faster. Test against a farther server and they’ll be slower. This variability can lead to results that aren’t always representative of the speeds you’ll experience in everyday use.

Google measures the speed between your Wifi point(s) and Google’s servers. We believe that testing speed against popular servers such as YouTube’s serversprovides a truer measure for normal, everyday internet use.

Multiple factors can go into speed tests when run on a router:

• Network congestion: High data usage at a given time can limit network speeds. Congestion can happen to your Wi-Fi network when multiple devices are actively using the internet and can also happen to ISPs when a certain area receives limited network speed due to heavy usage of the internet by everyone at the same time.
• Bandwidth throttling: Sometimes ISPs intentionally throttle networks at certain times of the day to regulate network traffic and minimize congestion.