See your real bandwidth.
When you set up your Internet connection with an ISP, you don’t need to believe what they tell you about bandwidth speeds. You can check it for yourself.
Although there are many bandwidth testers on the Web — your ISP probably provides one — I use one called Speakeasy Speed Test:
Take the Speakeasy Speed Test and test your connection speed! By measuring the download and upload rate from the following locations you are able to accurately judge your current line throughput or internet connection speed. To take the speed test, choose the server nearest you.
The Speed Test displays your results graphically using a speedometer-like meter. Here’s an example of what my terrible home Internet connection looks like with the upload test in progress. (Now you can see why I don’t want to move my office back home. I can just about pin the speed needle with my DSL connection at the office.) At the end of the test, Speakeasy plays a little advertisement and offers access to a search feature where you can see if their service is available in your area. (It’s not in my area, but then again, there’s only one non-dialup option available for my home and you’ve seen the results.)
While I’m not recommending Speakeasy — I know nothing about it — I do recommend this test. If you know of any others, don’t be shy. Use the Comments link to share them with the rest of us.
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Thank you for the review of Speakeasy.net. I ran across it while trying to ferret out information about downloads/uploads, etc. I am a woman whose life did not include computers due to my age. Now I am forced to use this bloody contraption and it is vexing beyond belief. I did learn some useful info from your article brava, brava!! You explained a process in clear English.
I have tested several of these bandwidth checkers today, and speakeasy.com returns a much higher reading than all the others, which makes me question its’ accuracy. Dslreports.com has a nice feature that lets you save history, so I tend to favor that site (plus it offers other tests). I also checked voip.com and speedtests.com and their speeds seemed comparable to each other excluding speakeasy. That is not to say that speakeasy is not accurate, only that it yields much higher speeds than many of the other tests out there.
Hope that help:)
Steve