We frequently talk about bandwidth and broadband speeds. I've been asked how you know just how much bandwidth you're getting from your provider, especially as opposed to what they're telling you.
The answer is, you run a speed test. There are several out there. But I'd like to call your attention to this one because it's being conducted by the FCC. The data may go into the National Broadband plan.
http://broadband.gov/
You do need to have Java running on the computer you're testing.
If you want to share your results and see what other libraries are getting, you can enter comments to the post.
Montana is running its own speed test for broadband mapping. You probably want to participate in this one as well.
http://www.mtspeedtest.org/
I've been asked by several people whether or not they should be concerned if they get different results from different tests. I don't think you should be concerned. Your speed can be greatly influenced by what tasks are being done by others on your network at the time the test is taken. As an example, I ran a speed test while I was downloading 2 200 MB podcasts. I got 3.44 Mbps. I ran the test again right after the podcasts had downloaded and got 5.1 Mbps. Audio or video downloads, streaming video, online games can all greatly affect your speed.
6 comments:
I got 6.125 MBps download speed on my home connection. Pretty impressive on a Qwest DSL 7.0 MBps line. I just tried to run the test again to record upload and latency but the site is too slow. It occurs to me that today and this weekend may not be the best times to be trying to access the broadbandusa.gov site since it's BTOP deadline time!
I got 2238 KBps (2.19 MBps) download and 905 KBps upload at my office during business hours. I also got 58 ms Latency and 55 ms Jitter. Ran a second test and got 2454 KBps Download, 441 KBps upload, 81 ms Latency and 1 ms Jitter. I want to test the computers for the public now because they have a different network.
Test 2 - 6194 KBps (6.19 MBps) - pretty consistent. 587 kbps upload - not very good at all. And 88 ms latency and 1 ms jitter. Must look that up because I don't know what jitter is.
At work, download speed 3284 Kbps, upload speed 799 Kbps, latency 67 ms, and jitter 19ms. After taking the test if you scroll down it defines all four. jitter was something like the delay time from the test server.
home test, quite a bit slower
download 1298 Kbps
upload 417 Kbps
latency 81 ms
jitter 7ms
It might be worth it for me to subscribe to the higher DSL package.
11.27 MBps download
1.83 MBps upload
Ping 86 ms
From UM campus, Mansfield Library
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