Testing upload/download bandwidth speeds for verification

Daniel B. Thurman dant at cdkkt.com
Fri Aug 14 15:29:43 UTC 2009


I have been testing my residential ISP/DSL-Landline
connections and wanted to make sure that I was getting
what I am paying for. Supposedly, one can use the various
website based "speed test" tools to determine their upload
and download speeds.

Are these "speed test" tools credible and can they
be trusted?

Of the several sites I have tried, they all more or less
seemed to be in close agreement with one another in
terms of the bandwidth speeds, i.e. my connection
speed is quoted at 768KB/s up and 3MB/s down,
and the farther away from central, the more reduced
is the speeds are.

The average speed tools says that I have measured
speeds of 720-30 KB/s up and 2.0-5MB/s down.

Why is it however, that when downloading software
from the various Linux/M$ and other downloads sites
I am seeing on average, speeds of 200-320(max) KB/s
and never see anything much faster than that?

Is this normal?

Has anyone gotten download speeds any faster that
what I have reported?

What I am trying to determine is if my ISP only shows
un-throttled speeds between me & them, but then somehow
throttles my bandwidth usage when I am using the Internet,
or is it more probable that download speeds are being throttled
from the download site itself?

Other than by using `speed testers', I have yet to find a download
site that pushes out more than 2-300KB/s?

I have tried HTTP, FTP & Bittorent and there is very little or no
speed improvements as far as I can tell.

Just wondering,
Dan




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