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How To Do An Accurate Internet Speed Test
You’re waiting forever for web pages to load? Or you spend more time waiting for a video to finish buffering than actually watching it? If you answered yes to any of the questions, you need to test your internet speeds to confirm your internet service provider (ISP) is providing you with the speed it is charging you for! And how do you do that? Well, simple – Speed Tests.
When you sign up for home internet, you often pay a certain price based on the speed of your connection. The faster it is, the more you pay. It’s important to know how to check if you’re getting what you pay for.
You might be surprised to find that you’re not.
In most cases your ISPs can easily give priority to popular speedtest websites. Or the speedtest website might be operating in low server bandwidth. So, in both cases, even if the speed website says you are getting 100 mb/s download, in reality, your actual download speed could be less or more than that.
Most speed tests measure three elements:
- Ping rate
- Download speed
- Upload speed
The ping rate measures the latency on a network. This is the time taken for a data packet to send from one machine to another, then receive a return.
Download speed is the most important figure. It signifies how fast data download to your computer, measured in megabits per second.
Upload speed shows how quickly you can upload data, such as when you’re backing up files to a cloud service. This is usually slower than download speed, and not as advertised by internet service providers.
Here’s how to check your home internet speed:
- Connect to your computer to your router using an Ethernet cable.
- Open your web browser.
- Navigate to Speedcheck.org
- Tap “Start Test”
Speedcheck will show you your download and upload speeds. Sometimes you might be a little below or a little above what you pay for. That’s fine, but you don’t want the results to be drastically below the speed you’re supposed to be paying for. Internet speeds can fluctuate throughout the day, so do multiple tests to see what your connection speed averages out to.
