Internet Speed

[daginge]

Thanx to rojash and fo3nix for their help but, can you please elaborate. After having carried out a speed test I got these results but am unable to interpret what they mean in real terms.

Download Speed 248Kbps
Upload Speed 327Kbps

Also will this affect the streaming of Poastman Pat etc. for daginge Junior as it will not run without pausing every 10 seconds or so and is causing RUCTIONS!!

Again, TIA of any help received!

[Tichfield]

Interpretation:

Doenload speed is very slow, according to those figures

[Cakeboy]

Without know what speed you're supposed to have it's hard to say whether or not that's quick.

248kb is just under a quarter of 1mb so it's slow. The slowest broadband connection is rated at 512kb so your is slow.

Try doing another speed check when you have nothing else running on your internet connection and see what that comes back with.

Pat's poor streaming is due to your slow download speed

[rojash]

Yeah there's definitely something weird here. the A in ADSL stands for Asymmetric, and what that means (in very simple terms) is that the upload speed should be slower than the download speed. But as the others have pointed out, when you do a speed test, you are measuring the download of a specific quantity of data from a specific site, so if you are simultaneously doing anything else which would require bandwidth, the measured speed will be incorrect. Don't forget also that the speed you are measuring is from your house to the test server, so when I say "doing anything else" that means on EITHER of your machines. You can't set one of them to do a speed test, then watch a YouTube movie on the other.

Of course, if you have Automatic Updates enabled it's also possible that your speed test could clash with your machine downloading an update in the background.

[daginge]

Thank again All!! Will look further!

[fo3nix]

I agree with the above, but I'll explain why the speeds you reported in your last question don't match the speeds you see here.

When you connect to the internet, your computers first go to your wireless router, and then down the phone line to your ISP. Then your ISP does some clever stuff to grab the website you want, and then feeds it back to you.

All these different connections operate at different speeds, and you're very much affected by the slowest of these speeds.

Imagine it being like a baton in a relay race, router computer running with it to the router, then your router running to your ISP, etc.

If just one person is slow, it'll slow the entire race down.

The speeds that you were reading, reported in windows itself, are for your computer to your router. Normally, this is 10mbps or 100mbps for a wired connection (ethernet), and 54mbps for 11g wireless connection. This is the maximum speed possible here.

However, your internet connection (router to ISP) is likely only about 2mbps. Thus you'll never ever see 54mbps speeds or anything like that.

[ACtheTROLL]

it also depends where the info is coming from

248Kbps is actually 5 times faster than a modem
(slow for adsl ... but still not bad

248 KBps as a download speed (shown by the download window) is better than not bad (2.3Mbps) - which is above the video streaming threshold)

if you look in your router .... it will show the theoretical connection speed based on the line characteristics (8Mbps on mine) ... but I normally expect 2-3Mbps (max) during the day on a home plan .... and 3-4 on a business connection.

as fo3nix says ... then it depends on lots more variables - not least of which is how many other people are logged on to your equipment (contention ratio) ... it's the equipment that's rated at say 8Mbps depending on the design that may be divided between 50 or 100 people.

Then there is what speed the server at the other end is working at ......

and also if any of the lophts or ivans are causing mischief to the backbone

and once you are connected .. the fair useage agreement may well allow your ISP to reduce your bandwidth over a certain limit between 17:00 - 22:00.

complicated isn't it?