Ever wonder how your internet service provider, home network, processor speed, and other factors affect the speed and quality with which you can watch videos on YouTube?
Wonder no more.
Google announced a personalized speed dashboard on Thursday for YouTube that tells anyone, in under a second, how fast their connection is to YouTube's servers, and how fast it has been historically, over time. The dashboard also graphs a comparison between one's speed and that of users in other regions, or users in the same region who use competing internet service providers.
"Speed is really important to us, and we've been working very actively on making the web faster... and also sharing with companies and users all around the world so that we can have a better web experience," Google product manager Amit Agarwal told Wired.com. "Any user, anywhere in the world, can get insight into what speed they're getting while watching YouTube videos."
Google announced the service on Thursday afternoon and its dashboard site is up and running at youtube.com/my_speed. If a competing ISP in your area offers a higher YouTube connection speed -- and you watch a lot of YouTube -- you might consider switching ISPs based on this data. For instance, the graph to the above right shows that Time Warner offers slightly slower YouTube speeds than other providers in my area do, on average.
This level of transparency could pressure ISPs not to slow down data from YouTube, because it will be clear to consumers if a given provider offers a poor connection. As the FAQ section on YouTube's speed dashboard says, other factors besides an ISP -- including home network configuration -- can affect one's YouTube speed.
However, home networking congestion can't account for an entire ISP offering, on average, a slower YouTube experience. From the data in YouTube's speed dashboard, people can discern that either something in their house (a slow computer or misconfigured wireless network) is causing the problem, or that their ISP is to blame.
As the battle over net neutrality heats up, such site-specific speed meters -- especially those that, like this one, offer historical and comparison data -- could prove invaluable.
