Broadband Speed

Hey

could someome please tell me how i can find the actual speed i am getting for my broadband and not one which tells me what i might be able to get,lol :cool:
Many thanks :D

There are several sites that test the actual speeds. Naturally, the reported speed can vary based on what time of day, how much traffic there is on the net, etc. One I know about is:

www.dslreports.com

It's not that easy. There are many speed tests you can try online.. some more accurate than others but none of them necessarily give a true indication of what your actual max download speed is... The main reason is because of all the net variables the data will encounter as the tests are being conducted. There are many many points between you and any test site that can cause slowdowns.. often intermittently.

Having said that I've found this test site to be pretty accurate at least 75% of the time..

http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/

But try the different sites more than once each.. maybe as many as 2 or 3 each at different times of the day to eliminate temporary slowdowns that will occur.

Another thing you can do is to time downloads yourself.. two ways of doing that. DUmeter is one small but effective program that will keep track of d/l speeds... You'd install it and then download some mid sized files from various sites to see what the speeds are like (eg- random software from download.com, snapfiles.com etc)

www.dumeter.com

there are probably some free progs that do this as well.. maybe others can point you in that direction. eg- my firewall.. Kerio v.4 has a small speed meter built into it.

You can also get a ballpark speed benchmark with a watch. Find a file to download.. helps if it's a nice round number in size... here's three..

www.igs.net/speedtest

and time how long it takes to download them with a stopwatch and then just do the math.

One last thing you can do is test the speed between you and your ISP.. that will eliminate some of the net variables you may encounter at various times.

Upload a file to yourself as an email attachment addressed to your own email address then download it and time how long it takes. Use the 1Meg file you can d/l from the IGS test site linked to above. (you can test your upload speed that way too)

on http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/ i have just ran 4 tests. the results are below:

1st
Download Speed: 853 kbps (106.6 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 236 kbps (29.5 KB/sec transfer rate)


2nd
Download Speed: 811 kbps (101.4 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 226 kbps (28.3 KB/sec transfer rate

3rd
Download Speed: 893 kbps (111.6 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 235 kbps (29.4 KB/sec transfer rate)

4th
Download Speed: 886 kbps (110.8 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 235 kbps (29.4 KB/sec transfer rate)

looking at that what speed broadband would you say i have?
Many thanks

From those 4, fairly consistent tests I'd say you have a 1Mbit hispeed connection. what are you supposed to have?

Keeping in mind all I said above... you'll want to at least try the same tests or more, from other cities, later on.

im on talktalk at the mo and they have mucked me about so much i want to pay the £70 and get out of the contract and go to someone else. they said to me i was on 512kbs, but i thought we were on 1mb and they told us that last year so i just wanted to double check.

It does look like it's a 1Mbit connection. That's double the 512Kbit so you seem to be on top of the deal right now.

thats awesome!! im gonna swap ISP cuz TalkTalk are doing my head in,lol

Thanks again

Personally I've never found those speed tests to be accurate enough to be worth bothering with. Every time I try one I get results that are far below what I get in the real world. I find the best way of finding what the performance is is by doing an actual download of reasonable size (20MB+). If you use IE it will report the final average download speed at the end.

Try using Opera. Whenever a download is opened from the Internet or saved to your computer, a Transfers window opens and gives you a quantified (%) download process bar, as well as a numeric download speed and percentage downloaded.

try this one
http://www.aroundsc.com/speedtest/speedtest.asp