What is “fast”?
Most people just assume their “high-speed internet” provider is giving them just that. But apart from taking their word for it, what do you really know about the performance you’re getting. When you think about it, internet providers have a good thing going: as long as most customers are able to download what they want without too much grief, how many of them are actually going to measure their speed? And if they do find alarmingly poor results, you can tell them “that was just a slow network period” and quietly upgrade their performance until the complaints stop.
I am reminded of the bad old days when spamming was a good business model. A network could claim they caught 99.99% of spam, while quietly selling bandwidth to acknowledged spammers to send to other networks. It was all a heady time. Pretty much, people got sick of it and now I get only a spam a week whereas I used to get them by the hundreds per day and had to design my own spam filters. I got pretty good at it.
But back to the current issue of performace… Occasionally I get as high as 6 or 7 Mb/s download speed, but more often than not it’s less than 1 Mb/s. Here are some tests from the wonderful site dslreports.com (www.dslreports.com/tools)
The number in green is the download speed and that in red is the upload speed.
These examples are from midnight on a Monday night, so I can’t really see the provider using the excuse that the network load is high.
So the next morning, let’s run some tests again. Here’s a couple from 9:00 AM (should be a somewhat busy time):
Well, 1041 Kb/s is a lot better than 423
And then at 10:00 PM the same night:
Incredibly dismal. Next morning at 7:40 AM the speeds are up a bit again:
But once in a great while I get some incredible reading like over 10Mb/s, such as in this case:
Overall, when I download from my wired connection, I always get much faster results. I understand that wireless (particularly 802.11g) is not ever going to be at 54Mbps, but it really seems I get results all over the map…
