What Internet connection speeds are webpage testing sites basing their results on?

Question

The loading time of websites can be measured with many popular tools like tools.pingdom.com, Alexa, and more...

According to answers like this one, load times might be considered in these categories:

Rough idea on page speed:

• 0-1seconds awesome
• 1-2seconds good
• 2-3seconds ok
• 3-4seconds poor
• 4-5seconds very poor

However, this doesn't seem to take into account the connection you're using. For example: by using a 64kbps connection, it would take a lot of time; a 512kbps again would take a lot of time; 512kbps - 8Gbps (my country's normal speed) would be good, as would a 8Gbps+ connection. So I thought page load speed depends on the user's Internet connection also.

Then what would "0-1seconds awesome" mean? What Internet connection speed is that measured with?

Answer 1

I got the answer from comments. All credits should go to the commentators.

Load times are dependant upon several factors such as DNS domain name resolution, the network between the requesting computer and the web server, the speed of the web server, and of course the connection speed between the web sever and the web. For these measures, a users computer and connection speed is not a factor. Why? Because these measures are between a service such as Google and the web server and not between a user browser and web server. Generally, these measures take into account the load time of the HTML and not necessarily the resources, though that is a consideration too. closetnoc

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Keep your site download lean. If your webserver has a larger load then you will need to tune the sever or upgrade it. For example, simply adding cache memory to Apache and MySQL often will speed up the server tremendously. Using a raid helps too. Memory is always your friend but having too much memory can slow down an OS depending. If your speed is good, don't sweat it! closetnoc

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As closetnoc indicates, for sites that provide page loading tests which do not allow you to set the connection speed, the load time is based on the connection speed to their server, which is why many will assign a performance rating based on a predetermined scale, or relative to the average sites they test (like with Pingdom). Some sites do however let you chose the connection speed, such as webpagetest.org, recommended by Google. If you click on the Advanced Settings link, you can select the connection speed there (which is likely simulated via throttling). dan