Techunzipped NewsNews – Techunzipped news offers the latest Zimbabwe Technology news, Daily Technology News in Zimbabwe, news online, South Africa Technology News, technology news as well as international breaking news
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.
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.