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.

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 website, and backend code for the test. 10% of the software work. Which is what everyone seems to think.

The code to managing the infrastructure, network connectivity, load balancing, and capacity planning is the 90% of the software part. But even then it is only 10% of the technical thing.

Getting all the ISP onboard to have your server in their network / exchange and to deal with you, takes more time and effort then all the software part. But even then it is only 10% of the project.

The remaining 90%? Non technical part for Sales and Marketing and getting user traction.

To put that into perspective, the website can be done in a weekend was only 0.01% of the work.

The audience here has never wanted to admit that the codebase doesn't really matter. Now that codebases can be created in a weekend, people are opening their eyes to this sentiment - the hard part is the sales, the code is easy.

Sales is hard, yeah, but look at everyone claiming to be building something amazing and it ends up 9 months behind schedule or just being an buggy, untested version of something that already exists in the market.

Throughout my career no software that hits $100m annual revenue was born from great code. That’s 2 fortune 100 hi-tech companies with other medium sized companies with revenue close to $1B.

There was one company that had better codebase than the others, unfortunately that company struggles to hit $2M MRR…

Looking back, it was painful to admit that code quality was not how the company succeed: it was overall strategy and luck.

Sigh.

I’m sure the viewpoint from being in mergers and acquisitions is quite different (and to me, often comes across as quite callow). I’ve been a software developer for 35 years (closer to 45 if you include my pre-professional life, aka adolescence) and have deliberately stayed “on the tools” in my career with working in codebases and product development as I’ve found that is where I am happiest and can make the best contribution, rather than move up the managerial ladder to my level of incompetence, to quote Peter.

To create a successful product in IT, or any industry really, it takes a lot of different skills, facets and (often competing) priorities. And those priorities do change over time. I’m sure by the time a product or service crosses your desk, the codebase quality is not as big of a priority. Earlier in the life cycle a shit codebase makes for a shit product that is a lot harder to grow and maintain — so much so that most of them have probably folded before they reached the stage of looking to be merged or acquired. I’ve dabbled in sound mixing for live performance and when training others I’ve mentioned the fact that it very hard to make a bad singer or musician sound good, but very easy to make a good singer or musician sound bad. Same goes for trying to make what would otherwise have been a good product or service with a bad codebase. That’s really hard and creates a hell of a lot more work for every part of the business.

I’ve had sales people tell me to my face that they are the most important part of the business and the actual product or services is not that important. And in my more callow stages of life experience I’m pretty sure I’ve reciprocated with words like useless and parasitic, and that I could replace them with a small bash script. But in reality what we all do is important to the complex endeavour of developing and maintaining a successful product or service. The existential threat of AI is moving up the ladder of incompetence and changing the face of what we do. It may even jump a few rungs in the process. But it’s not there just yet. Keep making good sales, keep making good mergers, good products, good acquisitions, good services, and good codebases.

— No tokens were harmed in the production of this comment. —

And yes it's easier to build a better company on a better product.

But history is littered with "worse products" that won in the marketplace.

It turns out that all the attributes you name are helpful but not necessary. Good marketing trumps good product. We see this over and over again.

The best combination is good marketing and good product. If I can only get 1 of those then I'll take hood marketing. Equally if you have a good product but bad marketing you don't get many (if any) users. The "ask" section on this site is littered with that.

So, assuming we can all make "good enough" code, the code doesn't matter. It's all good enough. The distinguishing feature is the marketing, because that leads to market share, and that's all any company is really selling (once it sells for a lot).

I'm upvoting you because your comment is well made, and certainly common, even if it is incorrect:)

Having been involved in multiple different acquisitions, on both sides of the table, I can anecdote that the code quality had no impact on any part of the acquisitions. The players are not buying or selling the code.

Your entire argument hinges on "good enough". Problem is: you can never know if something is "good enough", except in hindsight for those products that succeeded.

I'm upvoting you because your comment is well made, and certainly common, even if it is nothing more than a tautology :)

Bless your heart.

Are we talking about speed testing websites or the code that controls space vehicles? Perhaps extreme generalities do not provide useful insights.

> Now that codebases can be created in a weekend

Now that corporations are whitewashing copyright off of code so you can steal it without conscience.

> people are opening their eyes to this sentiment

Code is the product. Engineering is the discipline. That you can achieve high sales without good engineering is not a new idea. That it only provides short term benefits and leaves you irrelevant in the long term is the actual sentiment.

> the code is easy.

Coding has been easy since Perl was released. Knowing _what_ to code is the problem.

And even that is very rare in the field of software development.

Whats even worst then your competitors can claim awards for the Fastest ISP and your marketing people are furious!

Some ISPs wanted us to pin to their servers in our app to have the best possible results (we refused) while others wanted us to use their servers because they offered 10G service and none of the other servers had that much throughout. So their true 10G line would be limited by the server, not the line.

I think this is the part that people do not appreciate. Sometimes it genuinely it is not the difficulty of the task from a pure programming perspective, but 1) getting the users and 2) getting people to pay for the service and 3) getting the right people to sign off on that.

It is very similar in banking. The products themselves are not super hard ( though the challenges are real ), buy just getting to talk to the right people is a hassle.

What would you like to see?

Is this something being seen across all outsourcers like Accenture, Wipro, Infosys etc?

I should get this printed and framed

Snark aside, at least they have tight data controls and don’t sell that information.

But I don’t really have a lot of faith in the whole story and/or some of the management inside. Yeah there usually is always two sides to the coin. But tbh It’s too secretive. There has to be something there outside of simply “protecting the surprise.”

The biggest surprise (imo) when you start a business is how little of running a business is actually directly about the product. Having a product is essential, sure, and having a good product is nice, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

[1] https://newsroom.accenture.com/news/2026/accenture-to-acquir...

Without it, it limits your ability to recover damages from infringement.

Downdetector in fact just seems to be a website catalog with essentially a guestbook and hit counter...

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

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.

That said, why didn't Netflix acquire the market leader in this space? Creating their own seems way less useful, since network effects are the whole point.

ISPs definitely know when you run a speedtest.net test. 90% of the time, the data for that comes from boxes/services they host themselves. It’s not exactly hidden either. It’s a typical program any ISP can sign up for and you can easily see the destination the test is running against. I won’t be surprised if some have some logic to prioritize particular subscribers plan once they have detected a test from them. They probably view it as a “customer support calls reduction” feature.

Yeah, I suspect you could script it to do it daily. They definitely seem to deprioritize traffic from people that don't complain.

Just tap ‘More Info’ to show them

Fast is a one click solution to finding out your download speed from Netflix.

Latency doesn't matter, nor does upload.

That's why speedtest.net is a great purchase for Accenture. Of course Cloudflare's speed test is accurate: it's a test of how fast your connection is to their network. No more, no less. That their network doesn't have the same PoPs means it'll have different numbers than Ookla's test, your ISPs advertised numbers, Netflix's test, and any other speed test. But for people that don't see the Internet as a pile of different interconnected networks, the conclusion that a particular test is inaccurate is a win for Accenture.

When you search for a service you get the current status and you get the option to report a problem.

The minimal you expect from such a service is to keep track of how many % of users are searching also reports an error. There might of course still be errors but that alone surely can't be it. But please correct me if I'm wrong.

edit: and their own description only mentions actual reports https://downdetector.com/methodology/

https://www.ookla.com/ You can see an overview of the data they collect and sell on the corporate website

ZIR SV culture has built multiple generations of nerds that think that they can just effortlessly become billionaires. Ridiculous brain rot.

that capilarity is not something you can achieve overnight.

I don't know whether it pings to italy even outside italy/eu

https://misurainternet.it/misura-speedtest/?speedtest=inizia

Fast.com would detect that, and you could bypass that nonsense by changing your DNS.

Like another commenter pointed out, the deal is a data acquisition. Ookla is multimillion dollar business thanks to its awards and data programs with almost every telco a customer. Accenture was already a competitor thanks to their Umlaut acquisition

For most consumers, Ookla = Speedtest but there’s a lot more beneath the surface. Ookla owns a drive-testing firm, Downdetector (consumer based outage reporting) and a thriving SDK & server network. Most of the data comes via background tests and embedded SDK tests.

Imagine a large Accenture business being down. Would they provide that evidence even when that could harm their own SLA commitments with their clients?

I would trust Datadog more with https://updog.ai/

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

¹: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture

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.

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)