How to measure broadband connection speed?

stuffit

I'm in Drogheda and Esat/BT is my broadband supplier. I have a 2Mb download speed allegedly.


If I use the Internet Connection Speedometer from the McAfee site (http://us.mcafee.com/root/speedometer/default.asp) I'm told...

File Size: 150.005 KB
Time Elapsed: 8.172 seconds
Your Speed 146.88 Kbps (18.36 KBps)


If I use the BT site ( http://btopenworld.com/speedtest ) to download a 5MB file it only takes 25 - 30 seconds. I'm getting a speed of 197 KBps
ie 10 times faster.


How can this be?

I had broadband in my last house so know what a 512Kb connection feels like. My gut feeling tells me that the McAfee speed is correct. I've never gotten above 40Kb per sec using WinMx. And my web pages don't load instantaneously.


Is there a definitive utility I can use to test the connection speed?


Thanks

Ste

Karoma

iperf, or http://www.irishisptest.com/
you will get some difference between each test -as it's relative to the link also..

kaizersoze

You can't compare the results of the 2 tests as like for like.
The mcafee server is in the US so speeds are always going to be slower.
The BT server is in the UK so speeds are going to be better.
The www.irishisptest.com server is based in Dublin so that would give a better indication.
Just bear in mind that none of the speed tests are 100% accurate and at best all they are is a good indication at a particular point in time.

watty

There are FOUR parameters..

Upload transmission: Not just uploading files but how quick a click on a link is sent or a filled in form is sent or an email is sent to the SMTP server.

Download transmission: Not just download files but POP email reading, web page loading etc.

Latency: How fast anything starts noticing a change..
A very fast 19kbps system might respond in a few milliseconds, but thet data transfer is slow.
Satellite might have a 100Gbps transfer speed, but latency is maybe 3000ms. It is a VERY long pipe. A handshake has to go 100,000 miles at least. Events are very slow. Poor to useless for online multiplayer games.

"Ping" is a good test of this

Digiweb Wireless here seems to be a "ping" of the order of 10ms to 20ms with no packet loss. Irish Broadband 200meters from its basestation at Clarion was running on Thursday afternoon at about 150ms and 50% packet loss

Fourthly, Packet loss:
Analog dialup can have very high packet loss they are resent. This means the 40K dialip might be a "real" 20k dialup. This is why 64k ISDN can look better than IBB wireless at supposed 1Mbps. Ping on ISDN is usually very good (10ms to 20ms).

All of the tests depend not just on your own provider connection but:
1) How well you PC is setup. If XP, the "default eye candy mode" with all the default services on can make a 2GHz PC seem a 400MHz PC! Google for advice on that!

2) Your provider connection to you

3) Provider infrastructure

4) What bits of internet are used to connect to destination

5) The destination connection

6) The performance of destination server

7) How many people are using all the bits between and are on the server.

ftp.heanet.ie is a good place to test download speed for Irish users.

watty

Note that 8 BITS = 1 BYTE

Download speeds on your desktop are BYTES/s

Connection speeds are BITS/s

In fact due to protocol overhead etc, you multiply the KBYTE/s by 10 to get rough idea of the Kbps (bits/s) connection download speed.

Perhaps both give the same anwer.

BT was 870 to 345K BYTEs/s download here
McAfee got an overflow (NAN = Not a Number). This means either it couldn't measure at all or the "speedo" is right at speed is more than 2MBPS = 2M BITS/s
i.e. more than 200K Bytes /s

The BlackNight Irish Broadband speed gave 1.34Mbs (bits)

My official download speed is 3Mbits/s but contention is 48:1

This means that if all of us on that ISP connection did download at same time the worst case would be 3000/50 Kbps = 60kps., which with the low pack loss and low ping time would be fine on web pages.

The probability of everyone doing a 100M download at same time is low :-)

It depsnd on usage patterns too of the other customers you share with. If business users that arn't there at night, if school kids they arn't there during day.

I think my firewall prevented Blacknight measureing upload speed.

sturgo

www.internetfrog.com