Revision as of 11:12, 5 March 2014

What to expect from a speedtest

A speed test is a way of testing your internet connection speed. This is normally done with a single computer connected directly not by a wireless connection. The speedtest will determine the overall download and upload speed of your current connection.

Firewall

If you are protected by a local firewall you will

Latency

This is how long it takes for a packet (piece of information) to make a round trip to a selected computer.

For instance if you were to run the command ping $ping google.com PING google.com (173.194.33.101) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from sea09s16-in-f5.1e100.net (173.194.33.101): icmp_req=1 ttl=59 time=17.3 ms

You will see it took 17.3ms for the packet to go out and come back.

Jitter

This is the consistency of line

Packet Loss

This is the percentage of TCP/IP packets that have been resent due to errors. Normally you would want this to be 0

Download Speed

This is the speed normally represented in Mbps, that your connection is allowing incoming traffic to travel from a website to your local network.

Upload Speed

This is the speed normally represented in Mbps, that your connection is allowing outgoing traffic to send from your local network to a website.

Why are my download speeds different than what I pay for?

• Distance from the central office (CO) – This is the biggest factor in terms of affecting the speed you receive. The closer you are to the telephone exchange, the faster your broadband connection can be.(DSL/Dialup Customers)

• Number of connections in your home – You may have a wireless router that supplies a connection to multiple devices. Most people have at least multiple cell phones, laptops, TVs or other portable devices that connect at the same time. If any of those devices are on and streaming music, netflix, youtube, or any other multimedia site, this can impact your speeds.

• Quality of cables/modem – If you just upgraded your speed from a 10mb connection to a 100mb connection there is a chance that your old router or ethernet cables may not handle the higher speeds. It is recommended that you upgrade the ethernet cables first then upgrade your router to make sure your router can handle the higher speeds.

• Weather conditions – Heavy rain and extreme weather conditions can affect your speed and your connection. (DSL/Dialup Customer)

• Disconnections – If you experiences a power outage. There is a chance your modem did not powercycle properly. If you do not have your modem connected to a UPS - you will need to unplug the power for at least 30 seconds to properly shut down the modem and allow it to correctly come back up.

• Viruses/spyware/adware – Any form of infection on your PC can seriously slow down your connection. Make sure you are using the latest updates for any virus removal software (Norton, McAfee, AVG) and malware software (Malwarebytes) and run a scan at least once a week.

• Time of day – Unsurprisingly, the internet is used by more people during 'peak' hours – 6pm-11pm. Think of it as a highway Most anytime of the day you can travel at 65 MPH. However when you get off work at 5pm, and you get on the highway you would be lucky to get a top speed of 45 MPH. This is because everyone just got off work and are now heading home, and although the speed limit is 65 with so many cars it is just impossible to travel that fast.

• Website capacity – If you are going to a popular website where a lot of people are also visiting there is a chance that the website may perform slow.

You can test your speeds at: http://speedtest.xmission.com http://speedtest.net http://speedtest.utopiafiber.net/