You know the feeling. You’re trying to send that important email, download a key document, connect to your loved ones over Skype or just browse your favorite YouTube videos. And the Internet is slow. Before you tweet out some hate to your favorite ISP, you better make sure what’s going on, and with Speedof.Me you can make sure how fast (or slow) your internet connection is, not only on your Mac or Windows PC, but also devices that don’t support Flash or Java such as iPhones and iPads.

While Flash has long been loved for adding interactivity to web sites, its slowness (again?!) has been replaced by the speed and flexibility of HTML5, a markup standard for building web sites that makes it far easier to add animated segments, such as graphs that show you exactly how painfully slow your connection is. According to the simply named Flash VS. HTML, you can play HTML5 and Flash demos that compare the two. While Flash has a lot of benefits, HTML5’s Canvas is supported by almost all current mobile browsers, which is why Speedof.Me is the perfect connection test you can use on your mobile device, without the need to install Flash!

The benefit of not using either Flash or any other third party application is that the Speedof.Me is far faster than its competition, ensuring more accurate results.

How Does Speedof.Me’s Test Test Your Connection

Speedof.Me begins by downloading the smallest sample size (128KB) and, while showing you a real-time bandwidth graph of your connection, watching how long it takes for the download to finish. After the Download test finishes, Speedof.Me continues with an upload test that gradually increases the size of the documents it downloads until it takes more than 8 seconds to upload its sample.

To test your connection, Speedof.Me uses a content distribution network to host its sample files, that are located on 54 different “super servers” around the world near primary Internet exchange points. The service uses a lot of factors to choose the best test server so “the best” might not be the nearest, but the quickest and most reliable server. Some of the locations include New York and Boston in North America, Milan and Madrid in Europe as well as Jakarta in Asia and Sao Paulo in South America.

The Speedof.Me is actually very easy to use since all you have to do to start the test is press the “Start test” (obvious!) button on the app. It will then show you how fast your connection is, as well as the connection history graph. The only real downside of Speedof.Me is that, because it is a free service, you’ll have to endure a couple of ads on each side of the actual app – a small price to pay to know how fast your connection is!

Make Your Own Speed Test

Now that you know just how good this service is, you might want to do more with it. If you don’t like the look of Speedof.Me and want to add your own branding, or just customize it in some other way, you are free to do so by using Speedof.Me’s API – the first and, as they say, the only speed test API out there.

With its JavaScript speed test API you can not just create your own speed test service, but also benchmark the bandwidth of your website visitors or even tell the user how long it will take to download or upload a specific file based on their connection or location. So, how fast or slow is your connection?