 | By Fred Langa Is your ISP delivering on its speed promises? A great — and free — testing site not only measures your connection’s throughput but also interactively diagnoses and helps correct problems. |
Determining your actual bandwidth is tricky
Frank Ballman thinks his ISP may be shortchanging him:
- “My ISP has three levels of speed available. I pay for the highest, but I suspect that I rarely get what I pay for from them. Does any software exist that can periodically test the speed of my connection and log the results?”
Online throughput is a very complex thing and is affected by many factors. Yes, there’s the basic bandwidth of your connection to your ISP, but your own hardware and software configuration plays a part, too. Plus, your overall throughput is affected by every single router between you and whatever server you’re trying to communicate with. Most Internet connections hop through 10 to 30 intermediate steps between you and the final destination. Add in the distant server’s own hardware and software, and you can see just how many variables are in the mix.
This complexity is one of the reasons most ISP service agreements are written to state a maximum speed, not an average or minimum. Slow connections aren’t always the ISP’s fault. For example, my DSL provider’s contract promises speeds “up to 3 Mbps.” This is emphatically not the same as promising the full 3-Mbps rate. In fact, my ISP’s fine print states explicitly: “Actual speed may vary.”
But the right tools can help you see what’s going on with your connection and maybe where the problem lies. The better tools can also be used to tune or tweak your network settings to ensure that you’re getting all the speed your ISP has to offer.
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