Sunday, June 22, 2008

Are you getting the Internet speed you're paying for?
When you surf, do you feel like you're watching grass grow? It could be that things are moving slower than your Internet service provider promised.
It may not by your ISP's fault. There are a lot of connections on the Internet. For example, a slow router could be the reason.

Regardless, you should check your speed. And that's easy to do. Click on the following link to have your connection speed tested for FREE.
http://www.speedtest.net/
After going to the speed test site, click on the yellow pyramid to start the test.
Don't worry that your upload speed is much slower than your download speed. Most of the time you'll be downloading information.
My Road Runner connection advertises "up to 5Mbps downstream" and as you can see by my results, (over 6 Mbps) it wasn't a problem at the time I tested it. The speed of the connection can change depending on demand and time of day.
If your speed is consistently slow, you'll want to contact your ISP service.
You'll also find some neat features like comparing your results with others and displaying previous speed tests you've done over time in a nice line graph by clicking the Results tab.
You can see below that I started testing when I had issues with speed, and my results after several separate tests.

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