Speed Test Your Internet Connection

Wondering how fast your Internet connection really is? Those ISPs might not be giving you as broad a band as you are paying for Try this neat little site for a quick and dirty speed test. It told me that my download speed in Firefox was 3.973786Mb/s which is a gnat’s whisker short of what it’s supposed to be, so that’s okay. That is an awful lot of significant figures for a test that will presumably have a not insignificant variability. When I tried it again in Internet Explorer it told me I was downloading at 3.755433Mb/s, which is obviously slower but still within a reasonable distance of the proscribed 4 Mb/s. I reckon the test, at best, should show just one decimal place, but I reckon the guys at sod.ms are playing the same joke as Google Mail does with its storage space counter (2830.131092 megabytes, and counting).

You can also test your upload speed, although that test requires Java installed on your computer. For that result they show a chart and it gives the upload speed with three digits, not decimal point. Value I got was 372 kb/s or thereabouts.

Anyway, what use are these values other than to check that your ISP isn’t cheating you out of bandwidth? Well, you can use them to tweak your internet program for optimal performance. For instance, if your company utilizes BitTorrent (or maybe you’ve even used it to download copyright-free media) then you can optimize your settings to speed things up beyond the defaults.