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Don Bradbury points you to a test site you can use to put figures to it
Most of us, at one time or another, feel we need to complain to our ISP (Internet Service Provider) about their service, and often that's to do with the speed of the connection they are providing. If you are promised an 'up to 8Mbps' connection for Broadband - which is typical of many in the UK - that covers a multitude of possibilities. After all, download and upload connection speeds, especially the former, are the major reasons of finger-tapping while you're accessing the Internet. A streaming audio or video link, for example, depends heavily on the efficiency of your connection, though everything you do via the Internet is affected.
So measuring those facts is a useful "in the eye" pointer you might send to your service provider. But finding a suitably independent test site, whose results will be accepted, can be problematical. Some are known to be hopelessly optimistic. Well, we've found that a trusty test site is to be found at:
Run by Ookla Net Metrics, it offers a large range of test servers located around the world, though there are sensors which detect your approximate location among the world's regions and shows you the options that are open.
The one recommended for UK area users, for example, is located at Maidenhead. The map for your area shows all the current net of test sites, but some are preferable to others and the one that Speedtest recommends will be shown in yellow.
Hover your mouse pointer over the yellow recommended location and wait a second or two for it to be activated, then click on it and wait while your download and upload connection speeds are measured and reported. During the tests, speedo and stopwatch-type graphics report the progress, the outcome being averaged over the period chosen by the test site. The entire test only takes a minute or so.
You'll get other reports as well, such as the Latency of the connection, a measure of the delay in connections, or the amount of time that it takes from you sending a request, up to the time the site responds to it. The 'dead' time, in simple terms.
When the tests are finished, you'll see other options you might use, but the main figures are those download and upload speeds. As in our own trials, repeat tests at different times times of the day may well show grossly differing speeds, all to be taken account of when contacting your ISP. The test PC showed dramatic variability over normal (and some would think abnormal as well) office hours, as can be seen in the graph below.
No doubt the large decrease in download speed after about 4pm was mainly down to the kids getting home from school and logging on, later to be joined by family. With ADSL you might have to share your connection with hundreds of other people.
Upload speed was essentially constant, but download speed will probably be of greater interest to most online customers and this was seen to decrease to little more than the upload speed in the worst parts of the working day. The download speed itself was only around 75% of the "Connect @" speed reported by the ISP's software, so that might be considered a little misleading.
Connecting
The degree of difficulty of actually making a connection to the ISP's server can be similarly affected, depending on the time of day and the setup your ISP has provided at the local exchange. As we said, that will include the number of customers hooked up to your exchange. By all means tackle them about that, but at least Speedtest.net will give you some actual figures to report. Compare these with what the ISP says it is providing and you may have some ammunition to fire off.
All your test results are listed for review, and useful comparisons are graphed with the average from your ISP, so that's another useful factor to have to hand.
In conclusion
Speedtest.net gives you by no means all you need to know about your internet connection, but the download and upload speeds are what most folks complain about. Here you have verifiable figures to report to your provider.
There are lots of other connection speed test sites, but one advantage of www.speedtest.net is that it is not very fussy about your PC's setup. Flash 8 is expected, but that's about it.
