14 DAY TRIAL // Saying the people at Google are bit obsessed with speed is beginning to sound quite repetitive, but they seem to want to prove it every week or so. This time it's YouTube's turn, with a speedier and lighter redesign in the works, the video site has unleashed a new tool for those bitten by the speed bug among us. Precisely named YouTube Video Speed Dashboard, its page is showing how fast you're internet connection has been for the past month.
"YouTube video speed depends on many different factors some of which are the speed of your Internet connection, the Internet Service Provider (ISP) you are using and the distance to the video servers. The goal with this dashboard is to give you insight into what your YouTube speed looks like compared to the YouTube speed of users in other regions and different ISPs. We may also list the YouTube speeds for users in you neighborhood but with different ISPs," Kevin Carle, engineer, and Arvind Jain, engineering director at YouTube, wrote.
YouTube takes a look at how fast the videos you've been watching, in the same browser, have been in over the past 30 days and then makes an average so you can see how you stack up. It's actually pretty interesting, though probably completely useless, to see if your connection is faster than the average for your city. Moving further, YouTube also compares it to the average connection speed of your region, your country and finally the world. Incidentally, the world has an average connection of 2.91 Mbps.
While any info is great, there's not that much you can do with it, just knowing that you have slow connection, in case that the constant buffering wasn't hint enough, isn't going to make it faster, there's not that much users can do about that except complain to their ISPs. Also, the data isn't exactly scientific, not that YouTube is claiming that, as different browsers will report different speeds. For example, in Firefox the tool showed an average speed of 7.87 Mbps while in Chrome 8.74 Mbps for the same location and period and relatively equal use in both browsers. Inadvertently, this indicates that YouTube is using local cookies to keep track of usage, calming some of the privacy concerns a tool like this is likely to raise.