re: Network speed test

quote:

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I realize its up too 150 but does that really mean 20-150?

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All ISPs overload some nodes, but no you shouldn't drop that low. I'm not really sure how they manage their traffic, whether an overloaded node divides traffic evenly or if it "weights" by who pays for faster service, but if your 150 service drops to 20 regularly, you need to call every time it happens.

That said, from your reported numbers, I don't think your service is degraded that much. It looks to me like your expectations for wifi are too high, and you might have either some interference issues or your router isn't that great.


And again, something to keep in mind with speed tests is they will all give you different numbers (as you've seen). This is because there are SO many variables in play with any given test. There might be 20 or more "hops" between you and the test server, and any one or more of those devices may be saturated at any given time. For this reason, the best way I've found to measure what your service is really capable of is to fire up a large (and legal ) torrent with a lot of seeders and see what your rate gets up to. And remember to multiply by 8 to convert MB/s to mbps. Do this on a weekday evening between 7 and 9 to see how degraded your service gets, then do it on a weekend to see how fast it can get.

I wouldn't put too much stock into a speedtest. Download an ISO file from Microsoft, a torrent, or something from whatever they are calling Megadownload these days and you'll have a better idea of what type of speed you're getting.