Measuring Your Internet Connection Speed

You can't be too thin, too rich, or too fast

By Tiffany LeFarge

As a latter-day Tevye might comment, it's no sin to have a slow Internet connection -- but it's no great honor, either. In the ever-increasing need to have the fastest broadband connection possible, you need some way to measure the speed you're actually getting. Fortunately, there are several sites that offer a free speed-check.

The primary reason to use one of these sites is to calibrate your experience against your ISP promised. If the ISP guarantees you'll get 512Kbps upload speed, then these sites can help you find out if you're being shortchanged. If the access from a hotel conference center seems distressingly slow, these sites give you useful data to wave at the hotel staff. And, if you're making changes to a computer's TCP/IP configuration, these sites can help you establish a performance baseline.

For the most part, the sites against which I tested gave roughly equal numbers. I tested on my business-class cable modem connection. A scientific measurement might have used a minimum load without anything else running but I left my "ordinary" applications running in the background (such as e-mail and instant messaging).

Thus the results should be fairly consistent across each of the sites, but some variation is expected given background processes.



All these sites are free to use, with the arguable exception of our first listing, Bandwidthplace, which lets you do three personal tests per month. Its results were the least consistent of the various sites, however. The first time, I got these numbers:
and ten minutes later (with the same general load on the system), Bandwidthplace told me this:
I expect some variation, but that's a surprising amount.

The great granddaddy of Internet connection speed sites is DSL Reports, which lets users compare notes on broadband service providers as well as check their own connections.

The Speakeasy test delivers a nice, basic set of results, without a lot of analysis. It does distinguish between upload and download speeds, however, which is helpful because my ISP does, too.

InternetFrog has a useful graph that gives more than numbers; it demonstrates where your actual speed is relative to expected broadband speed for cable, DSL, Ethernet, T3, and so on. It also includes a rating for Quality of Service (QOS), which represents the level of consistent download capacity provided by your Internet Service Provider (ISP). Says the site, "The higher QOS percentage, the higher the overall quality of the connection - which results in better connections for high traffic applications, such as streaming content (audio, video, VoIP calls, etc.)"

Toast.Net has several tests available, which may be particularly helpful if the connection you're trying to troubleshoot is of one particular type (an XML server will care mostly about text loads, for instance). Unfortunately it gives rather spare results unless you sign up for their premium service.

McAfee has a free Internet speedometer service, but it, too, is rather spare in its results, and doesn't give you any context for the numbers.

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