Internet Speed Tests and Problem

[TMan]

I'd almost gotten used to really sucky internet speed from using my wife's DSL in India. Finally, it dawned on me: I'm paying for 15M download speed and this thing is running like a 2400bps modem.

Saturday morning I ran the verizon speed tests; speedtest.verizon.net/SpeedTester/help_speedtest.jsp

It showed my download speed to be at 14M, but my upload speed to be .025M. Well no wonder. Even when you are downloading stuff, it is uploading some sort of responses. When I pinged my router from the command prompt: "ping 192.168.1.1" it was dropping 75% of my packets.

I called Verizon. After over an hour on the phone and many different attempts to reset the router. I was told that everything looks okay, but "we will send out a technician today".

He looked at the lights on the router, went out to his truck for his laptop and plugged it in. A few minutes later - back to the truck, install the new router and now my speed tests results are:

14.2Mbps download and 4.751Mbps upload speed, and we are back to flying instead of crawling. That is a 190 times improvement on the upload speed.

Moral of story: 1) occassionally it doesn't hurt to run a speed test to see if you are getting close to the response that you are paying for. 2) stay out of India.

[MLB]

Another speed tester I like to use is:

www.internetfrog.com

Odd name, but I like the interface.

[5ontarget]

I went from a 28.8 dialup connection to a cable modem a little over a year ago. Talk about a quantum leap!
As for the moral of your story. I've got the second point all locked up. I haven't run the speed test in a while. But I did today. 360kbps upload, and 4Mps download. Not blazing (especially the upload), but still much better than fixing dinner while some of the pics load on the forum when I had dialup.

[TA]

Here is a good and seemingly accurate speed test. www.speedtest.net