Ookla, the company behind the popular speedtest.net broadband performance testing service, has released a new edition of the service this week with a few new features.  The already useful service is now even more useful with user accounts that allow users to save and share their test history data which is extremely useful for performance troubleshooting.  Being able to share the performance history with broadband technical support makes it easy to prove performance problems so that the issues can be dealt with.

Speedtest.net has always provided the most accurate broadband testing method compared to the previous inaccurate data from the FCC).  Speedtest.net detects the nearest servers and employs multiple TCP flows to mitigate congestion, and the latest version improves nearest server detection.  Long distance testing are great ways to determine the overall performance of the Internet and the content providers, but they’re not relevant to broadband performance.  The broadband provider should be accountable for broadband performance but not for overall Internet performance and overloaded servers from content providers.

Another notable new feature on speedtest.net is Speed Wave, which allows users to create a custom leader board to show off performance statistics of different groups of broadband subscribers.  That provides more useful data for anyone interested in analyzing broadband performance across various geographic regions and demographics.  This makes the data invaluable for consumers, researchers and policymakers.