Downdetector and Speedtest sold to Accenture for $1.2B
theverge.com108 points by Garbage 3 hours ago
108 points by Garbage 3 hours ago
I am not sure why this old news is surfacing here today but I can give my 2 cents, since I sold speedchecker.com last year and were directly competing with Ookla.
The main business is selling the data. You use Speedtest.net to troubleshoot your connection but metrics captured with the test alongside location data give telcos invaluable insights on where they should improve their networks. Telcos pay 6 figures annually for this data and we have a few hundreds of of those big MNOs globally. This market is pretty big. Accenture is in trouble with their main consulting business due to AI so acquiring data business is one of the smart strategies they can implement to stay relevant.
To all commenters who think they can code it over the weekend, yes you are right. I coded my first speed checker over the weekend in 2008 but it took me 18 years to grow the user base , figure out entreprise sales strategy and exit. Its not easy as it seems.
As someone who worked at a CDN for years, I imagine the code is the easiest technical part. Managing the infrastructure, network connectivity, load balancing, and capacity planning would be the harder parts, outside of the sales and marketing bits.
If you don’t get all of those parts right, you are going to end up measuring your own bandwidth rather than the client’s.
The partner network of Speedtest is also impressive. I don't know how many speed tests they need to handle in parallel, but usually it's always enough to do speed tests up to 5-10 Gbit/s. With more and more fiber connections also latency becomes very relevant. Otherwise the tests would be meaningless. Speedtest manages to measure less than 1ms latency on my fiber connection.
Once you have a good amount of users testing, its not that difficult to get free servers from the ISPs. The secret is that on-net servers show testers better performance than off-net so every ISP wants to contribute the speed test server. If they dont do it they are shooting themselves in the foot by routing their traffic to competitor networks and getting test results behind their peers.
Whats even worst then your competitors can claim awards for the Fastest ISP and your marketing people are furious!
Sure, but it's still a huge effort to set up all those partnerships and keep them alive. ISPs are often traditional and slow moving companies, it probably takes a lot of work to get those servers in place at the right locations.
Any recommendations for similar tools to check network metrics other than speed ? Used to be a few free ones but would be nice to have an easy one to use
How come ISPs aren't providing that data internally from observing their own traffic ?
thanks fornthe insights. inthought it was a wopping number but this makes totally sense. never realised this was gather valuable data for network operators. cool insights!
what was the point where you had enough data to make it worthwhile for telcos?
I would say if you can reach 1% of the population in a given country every month then you are starting to be interesting for the telcos.
Why did you sell it?
Money without having to do more work > money that you have to keep working for
"By integrating Ookla’s data products, including Speedtest®, Downdetector®, Ekahau®, and RootMetrics®, Accenture will help Communications Service Providers (CSPs), hyperscalers, and enterprises optimize the mission-critical Wi-Fi and 5G networks that power their digital core. [...] Ookla’s data platform is anchored by more than 250 million consumer-initiated tests per month, complemented by controlled drive, walk, and embedded testing options"[1]
[1] https://newsroom.accenture.com/news/2026/accenture-to-acquir...
Is there some legal reason to scatter announcements with that many ® symbols, or do they just do it for style reasons / because they think it makes the announcement look more impressive?
Using the symbol allows them greater protection under the Lanham act, because it counts as “notice” that the mark is registered.
Without it, it limits your ability to recover damages from infringement.
that's nuts, unless I'm missing something, it doesn't seem like those products are that mind blowingly complex... wow. Makes we want to try building my own for the hell of it.
Downdetector in fact just seems to be a website catalog with essentially a guestbook and hit counter...
Of course they are not complex. They do have a network effect though. If you go to your local ISP and say “hey, my 500mbps plan is only doing 100mbps on Speedtest.net”, they’ll “fix it” (usually by working with Ookla to put an edge endpoint on their network)
If you tell the “hey frankyspeeddetect.com isn’t doing my 500mbps” they’ll tell you to it’s an issue with that random website. ISPs and services reach out to Ookla to onboard with them because they have a network effect/mindshare of whatever you wanna call it
When I used a major cable ISP, often my connection seemed slow, so I'd go to speedtest.com. The speedtest would be fine... and then I would magically have faster network performance again.
It happened enough times that I'm suspicious the ISP had some way to detect if you run a speedtest, and then prioritized traffic to that customer.
This was one of the reasons given, at the time, for why Netflix created fast.com. It's served by the same infra that does their streaming, and is thus difficult for isps to game. That is, it'd be hard for them to do some hack to make fast.com numbers without also benefiting Netflix streaming performance in the bargain.
http://speed.cloudflare.com is a bit harder to argue with though.
The difference is that until now I had never heard of speed.cloudflare.com before. (I know about fast.com though.)
The valuation must be outside of the tech. Are there relationships or contracts Accenture is getting access to?
Clearly. They are buying all the servers that are already imbedded in ISP networks.
thefacebook.com was developed in a few days, too. The value was never in the code.
the best part is Downdetector is inaccurate as hell - if AWS is genuinely down, folks get curious and search other providers, causing Downdetector to mark them as down too
dont miss it, its almost all about users and revenue not how complex or simple product is.
You’re not paying for the tech, you’re paying for the name and the users. Speedyest claims 40m unique users per month.
That's a lot of money just for network topography, but may someone let them in and it has a whole map of an otherwise hidden or inaccessible network.
Ookla has huge amounts of data, speedtest’s software is integrated into networks and used by hundreds of millions of users, they have the most comprehensive information about internet connections. You can recreate the software but you can’t recreate the data without decades of integration into what seems like every network.
https://www.ookla.com/ You can see an overview of the data they collect and sell on the corporate website
speedtest has a lot of volunteers hosting local servers, which you need to do a good last mile speed test.
that capilarity is not something you can achieve overnight.
The valuation is the name recognition and that that’s where people go to do those things
may i suggest nettfart.no by the norwegian government as an alternative ? at least the name is fun
There is also the Italian one, AFAIK you can use this as an official tool to check whether your speed is at least the minimum speed that should be provided by contract.
I don't know whether it pings to italy even outside italy/eu
https://misurainternet.it/misura-speedtest/?speedtest=inizia
It's not the net fart that kills your connection, it is the server smell.
While neat that a government operates this, I’m not sure it’s a viable alternative for most users given that the servers are AFAIK all in Norway. For example, the latency from my network was 150-200ms (compared to 6ms for the Speedtest.net server) and the speed test results appear less consistent than they may be in/near Norway.
fast.com is my go-to in the rare case I need to check network speed these days
We used fast.com to speed test our new office internet connection and the next day got an irate email from corporate (who had argued we didn't need the new connection) about "watching Netflix all day". I imagine some C-level thought they had a real gotcha! moment until I showed them the site.
I read a while ago that certain ISPs will optimize the traffic to Netflix's servers, and so when you run fast.com (which is my default, by the way), you get your Internet speed for watching Netflix, but not necessarily for other things.
That was very relevant in some scenarios. When Spectrum was fighting with Netflix, they would force Netflix traffic to a peer circuit that was under provisioned as a shakedown tactic.
Fast.com would detect that, and you could bypass that nonsense by changing your DNS.
Out of curiosity, I just compared my home wifi between fast.com and cloudflare's speed tedt and got similar results, completely and definitely disproving (n=1) my claim above.
why is it named this? i'm guessing "fart" means something different in your language :-)
And now every SLA that Accenture is held to for uptime suddenly will never be breached…
Why tho?
That seems like a lot for name recognition. I bet you could rebuild their technology for like $20m at the most, and buy 100% market share for like $100m easy. Unless they have some other assets other than the obvious?
Isn't Speedtest's huge dataset of Internet speeds mapped to time, location and IP address, as well as data on VPN usage (a user checks the speed of his/her direct connection then turns VPN on and checks over that too, all within the same session) such an asset?
I doubt they didn't collect all of that.
P.S. Now marry that huge dataset with services that Accenture provides, among others:
"In February 2025, Vice News spoke to a former Accenture employee under the condition of anonymity. His project on the WhatsApp team for Meta required him to sift through images and decide whether or not they depicted child sexual abuse, which he coped with "through a lot of substance abuse". The former employee claimed to have witnessed multiple missed opportunities to protect children, and alleged that one colleague had previously been arrested for possessing child abuse materials. In a statement, Accenture said they are "committed to helping companies keep their platforms safe through services such as content, advertising, and compliance reviews."¹
Fast.com has existed for 15 years yet isn't nearly as popular. It's easy to build a new speed test, but much harder to get people to use it.
Downdetector wins because of SEO. Most people don't get there directly, they google for "is $x down" and then get sent to downdecetor. Which from my understanding works by simply showing you how many people came to their site with those search terms. They don't actually check the sites.
Fast is a Netflix product so the fact that you've even heard of it is in direct relation to the weight of the brand that launched it.
speedtest.net has been the first search result on Google for "speed test" for decades. Partly the boost of domain SEO and partly the boost of it being an effective exit node for searches for that term for that long.
(Nobody searches "ookla" and nobody is going to search your tier-3 .com)
It takes more than money to supplant the name brand that every ISP games and every front line support worker uses by name
selling peoples ip addres for some reason along with whatever privacy invasion tech they have.
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