For years I used the BBC's iPlayer diagnostics site for a quick, simple, lucid way to see what speed our BB was running at. It did a quick test, showed you your speeds found, and simply told you what BBC streaming facilities you'd be able to make use of (from audio up to HD telly iirc).
It used to be at but for some reason which I haven't been able to fathom, they have deleted it utterly.
I'm (actually) not that interested in seeing if I can use iPlayer or whatever: I'm interested in seeing the current speed for our line.
What do people recommend these days as the simplest, most accurate, and (like the Beeb's site used to be) the most disinterested site for displaying your speed?
Plusnet point me at which seems nice and straightforward, but it's not exactly informative for the amateur (what does Ping latency mean ffs?).
According to that site, btw, I am getting 4.37Mbps d/l (which seems fairly good, for us), 0.41Mbps u/l (which seems crap, but I don't upload stuff much), and 41.75ms ping latency.
They seem to give differing results. ThinkBroadband is currently reporting 18 Mbps on my nominal 20 Mbps cable connection whilst the BT speedtest reports 17 Mbps and
formatting link
reports 8 Mbps. (Though the latter has the best graphics.)
It's how long your data packets take to cross the Internet, rather than how fast they travel. Compare a travel report that tells you you have a clear 70 mph run down a motorway, but your destination is 2 hours away.
Latency is important to people playing online games, as the latency is added on to their reaction time. So a long latency means they've been shot by an opponent before they can even see their opponent on-screen. Lowish latency is also useful for 2-way audio/video calling, such as Skype and equivalents.
If you are streaming data in one direction, such as watching online video or downloading files/web pages, latency isn't particularly important (unless it's so long that it interferes with acknowledgement packets).
Great: you should get BT to pay you to add that nice lucid, real-world description to their page Graham! Thanks a lot.
BTW I know what a ping is (I was working in computing [as an info officer] when we routinely used ping to find if a host was alive. However BT's use of the jargon on that page is not user-friendly, at all.
Depending on what flavour of ADSL your exchange/ISP is providing, 400k (ish) may be the highest upload speed available. What are the upstream and downstream synch rates and noise margins?
Ping time reflects the round trip time for an end to end response of the link. It's an important parameter when using the internet connection in an interactive session such as when playing 1st person shoot 'em ups with others over the internet (internet play).
Too large a Ping time value, eg 70ms or longer, will leave you at a disadvantage compared to other players enjoying 30 or 40ms ping times (between themselves and the game server they've chosen for their network gameplay) since they'll be able to blow you away before you've had a chance to dodge incoming fire.
Your figures tell me one thing straight away and that is; you're not with a cable ISP (effectively VM - are there any other cable companies in the UK?).
Just to make you feel bad, here's my results from speedtest.net;
Chosen endpoint server is about 45 miles away, hence the tight ping times.
As you can see, choosing a closer end point doesn't necessarilly improve ping times or speed. Although in this second case, the speed figures are within a percent or so of each other between the chosen servers, the ping times being the biggest difference (and in the opposite sense to what one might have expected!).
You don't need me to tell you that I'm on the standard 30Mbps VM cable broadband service (35,000,000 bps, actually) with the 2Mbps U/L speed option as opposed to the dearer and slightly less stingy 3Mbps U/L option.
The speed.net results reflect my local connection speed as supplied by VM and reported by the VM Superhub cable modem/router.
It might not be too obvious to you but most of the rest of the internet cannot match those local cable speeds. Indeed, a good portion of it won't even match your existing D/L speed (yeah, hard to believe, I know).
BTW, your U/L speed isn't quite as crap as you might suppose (it's just under 10% of the download speed which is a typical ratio in the asymetric use of the link bandwidth budget over the local line (be it ADSL or Cable). In my case, I'm only getting 5.7%, well short of the 'accepted' 10% for the U/L link speed.
The Beeb used to be good. I wouldn't trust some of the private ones as they may have an interest in you changing ISP and so reporting slower rates on your current one. Rusty
I doubt whether the mighty Microsoft and Nvidia servers will match your D/L link speed. You'll probably have to download from a well seeded torrent to saturate the link (or use one of those download managers that cheats by pretending to be more than client grabbing the same but different parts of the file).
You're not kidding! I'd assume joining a network game on that connection would be a "Sackable Offence", or, at the very least, lumber you with an official warning.
If you're well in with the boss (or you _are_ the Boss) you might be able to persuade him (or you) to let you try it out of hours. :-)
To be perfectly honest, the 30Mbps service is more than ample for my needs, even the "Retentions" service (5 or 10Mbps) would do for most of my interweb activity (it would have seemed like an indulgent luxury not so many years ago - I remember when the lowest speed offering was a mere 128Kbps (successively upgraded "For Free" to 150Kbps -> 2Mbps
yes I'll have to fiodn somethink to give it a test. A major apple system system update would be good test but I've noticed the apples servers can;t always handle it themselves.
A difficult one to judge as I think I could at lunchtime, but then perhaps it would adversly affect other services in the lab, although I'm connected to the same switch as are the other 24 or so PCs here.
Did so a while ago but didn't have a suitable game I could try it on.
It is amazing when I think how long it took to copy from one floopy to another on a macplus.
I didn;t really go for the full download speed, it was the upload speed that attracted me as putting video files on youtube seemed to take ages and that was just SD or lower res. let alone what HD would have taken.
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