Broadband speed tests between Apple and Windows

The IPS I use at the moment is BT Infinity, which sells itself as a high speed broadband supplier. I thought recently I would try to check what speed I was getting

Below are some results of speed checking web sites. I concentrated on just the download speeds and on both iOS and Windows I used Google Chrome as the browser.

Speedtest.net
Apple - 37 mbps
Windows XP - 3.19 mbps
Android App - 14 mbps

BroadbandSpeedChecker.co.uk
Apple - 34 mbps
Windows XP - 3.38 mbps

I was surprised to see such a difference in the results. The results are the best I could archive and are not the average, but you can see a clear difference between Apple and Windows. I tried the speed tests on 2 different Windows XP machines and got similar results, so concluded at the time that it was not the hardware.

The following day, I looked at just using my Mac with a Windows virtual machine installed, here are the results:


Speedtest.net
Apple - 19.8 mbps
Windows - 17.8 mbps

BroadbandSpeedChecker.co.uk
Apple - 13.5 mbps
Windows - 5.9 mbps


You can see that the following day the speed was generally less, this could be the time of day and other factors, but these results are using the same hardware, just different operating systems to run the browser. Speedtest.net web site does seem to get very similar results, which would hint that different hardware (same router) could make a difference, but with BroadbandSpeedChecker it seems that different operating systems also make a difference.

In conclusion I think these speed testing web sites are a useful tool, however I am still not confident on how accurate they are and do not understand why Apple iOS gets such better results.