Check Your Internet Speed
Last updated: Aug 14, 2007There are many reasons to check your internet speed. One reason is to troubleshoot your network to see if you are limited by your upload speed or download speed. Another reason is to find out if you are getting the advertised speed you were promised. Internet speed tests are really easy to do and only take a few minutes.
To check your internet speed go to the speak easy speed test. Then click on the server that is closest to you.
What do these connection speeds mean?
Network bandwidth is almost always measured in bits. eg. 3 Megabit per second connection or 3Mb. This however is often confusing to consumers as download speed and files are measured in bytes. So how fast can I download a 3 megabyte file? Many users would make the mistake and say it would take about three seconds. In order to determine how long a download will take you need to convert megabits to megabytes :)
A bit is a digit of data, either a 0, or a 1. A string of eight bits equals one byte so 1 megabit is equal to 125 kilobytes which would take about 25 seconds to download on a 3 Megabit connection.
An easy rule of thumb would be to take about 1⁄10 of the connection speed to determine the approximate download speed. So a 3 Megabit connection would roughly download a file at 300 kilobytes a second.
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