Today’s Bandwidth March 9, 2009
Posted by Conrad Hubbard in : The Chip , trackbackI don’t know if I will actually stick with this for very long, but I figure I will give it a try for a little while. CNET offers a “bandwidth meter” which attempts to measure the relative speed of your internet provider at the moment you use the meter. I am currently using Comcast, and I have noticed that my speed has been very variable in the past.
[Today's bandwidth meter result: 860 kbps.]
Comments»
I like the interface at http://www.speedtest.net/, and they also allow you to test different locations — your speed getting stuff from Atlanta will be different than your speed downloading from New York, or California, or China. I have, however, found their numbers to be highly suspect — they seem very high to me, definitely higher than I’ve ever actually seen in normal use, by a factor of about 2.
My CNet results were 708.5 Kbps (which seems low), SpeedTest.net results were 13,657 Kbps to San Francisco (which seems very high). Based off of anecdotal evidence, my actual speed usually seems to be somewhere around 800 KBps (or 6,400 Kbps) when downloading a file from a “bigger” site like Microsoft.com.