Your internet provider says you should be getting a specific speed for the price you’re paying, but are you really getting those speeds? There are many useful sites that you can go to to test your speeds but it’s important to remember that all speeds can vary from test to test.
Varying Speeds
Let’s say that your internet provider is supposed to be supplying you a 12 Mbps connection on your downstream. At times that may test at 10 Mbps or 9400 Mbps. It’s important to note that these fluctuations are usually of no major concern and are a product of “normal” changes in your bandwidth. However, if you find (in our hypothetical situation) that you’re only getting 4 or 5 Mbps, something has likely gone wrong and you should contact your internet provider.
Bits VS Bytes
Don’t be confused by the data rates being advertised by your service provider. All to often do I run into people who are confused about the download rates they are seeing when downloading a specific file. Here is the easiest way to show the difference between 1Mbps and 1 MB/s.
1 Mbps is equal (=) to 0.125 MB/s
Remember this when your looking at the data rate for a given download, the speeds you’re seeing will make much more sense.
Bottlenecks
Remember that just because your connection to the internet is fast doesn’t mean that what your connecting to is. Many servers will only offer a certain amount of bandwidth for you to use when obtaining data from them. This is because the people who set up these servers want to reduce the overall load on their system. One way to get around this issue is to offer content through a torrent, this will allow for much higher data rates with minimal impact to server load. Torrents will be discussed in another article.
Websites to test your speed:
Here are a few websites that I have found to be the best when it comes to testing your bandwidth.