Accenture buys Speedtest owner Ookla for $1.2 billion

Accenture has agreed to buy Ookla—the company behind Speedtest and Downdetector—for $1.2 billion in cash, according to Ars Technica. Ookla also owns Ekahau, a Wi‑Fi planning and troubleshooting suite, and RootMetrics, which tracks mobile network performance. The deal would move some of the most widely referenced consumer-facing internet measurement tools into the hands of a global IT consulting and services firm.

On paper, the logic is straightforward. Accenture says it will fold Ookla’s data products into offerings aimed at communications providers, hyperscalers, governments and other large customers seeking to “optimize” Wi‑Fi and 5G networks. Ookla’s platforms collect and analyze massive volumes of performance signals—Speedtest alone sees about 250 million consumer-initiated tests per month, Ars reports—while Downdetector is often used by media and companies to confirm outages. In a world where connectivity is sold as a service-level promise, measurement becomes a commercial asset.

The shift matters because measurement is not neutral. When the same firm that advises operators, cloud providers, and public agencies also owns the tools used to define “the experience” and to detect incidents, the boundary between diagnosis and sales pitch narrows. Accenture’s own statement, quoted by Ars Technica, frames the bundle as end-to-end: Speedtest and RootMetrics define performance, Downdetector flags incidents quickly, and Ekahau helps redesign networks. That is a neat package for a procurement department—one vendor to measure, recommend, and implement.

This is also about standards by practice. Downdetector has become an informal public scoreboard for outages; Speedtest results are routinely cited in marketing and regulator discussions. Once those signals are integrated into a consulting product, the incentives tilt toward proprietary dashboards, paid access, and “managed” interpretations of what the data means. Individual users will also fall under a new privacy policy if the acquisition closes, Ars notes—an unglamorous detail that becomes more consequential when the buyer’s core business is enterprise services.

Ziff Davis bought Ookla for $15 million in 2014, Reuters reported, and is now selling it for $1.2 billion. The value uplift is a reminder that, in modern infrastructure, the meter can be worth more than the pipe.

For most people, Speedtest will still be an app you open when the Wi‑Fi feels slow. After this deal, it is also a line item in a consulting contract.