Your location is determined based on your IP address. We primarily rely on an internally developed method, which positions you on the map and determines your closest testing server.

When a speed test is performed on a GPS location-enabled mobile device using a WiFi router, we’re able to correlate that GPS information to a specific broadband connection. We then use those GPS coordinates to compute latitude and longitude, and to determine the center of a specific IP subnet. We sample all of the IPs and the center of that specific subnet is defined by 50% of the IPs being within 100 kilometers of it. Since there are 254 IPs within a given subnet, we then assume that any IP within that subnet is within range of the latitudinal and longitudinal center.

In the event that we don’t have enough data to properly position your IP address, we do rely on GeoIP data from MaxMind as a backup location service. We also use it to reverse geocode your location, so that we can put a city, state and country name to the latitude and longitude coordinates that we’ve determined.