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While most home PC use a (A)DSL Internet connection that is said to run at a high speed, you may have noticed that the actual speed you are experiencing is actually lower than the telephone company asserted. Not everybody knows that this is due to the fact that DSL Internet connections in general suffer a severe loss of speed which is proportional to the distance between the user and the next telephone station which acts as an access node to the Net. Internet speed can also vary based on a number of other factors, most notably the current congestion rate of the network.

Therefore, you might find it useful to check your Internet speed. The Internet offers many possibilities to test it, and the easiest seems to be the test you can find at SpeedTest (http://www.speedtest.net/). When you enter the site, you will be presented a world map: click on the pyramid that resides the closest to your current location, and the test will start. In short, this program downloads and subsequently uploads a file from and to a server which is located in the location you chose. By monitoring their own network speed in their own connection, the program is easily able to tell what is the observed speed of your Internet connection.

Another useful data that this little program provides is the ping time. A ping packet is a bulk of data that is sent to the remote server; the server then replies by sending back another packet. The operating system of the user can therefore calculate how much time passed from when the packet was sent to when it was received, and the time (often around 50 ms) is a measure of how good congestioned at the time of the test.

In order for the test results to be reliable, you need to suspend all other activities before taking the test, so to use all of your available band for the test. Moreover, since the Internet conditions can greatly vary over time, if you're looking for an accurate measurement, it's always best to repeat the test many times and in different parts of the day and different days of the week, to test the different congestion rates which directly affect your Internet speed. Of all the values you get, of course the one closer to your real speed is the higher - the one obtained when the network was less congestioned.

Learn more about this author, Dario Borghino.
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