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Okay, staying on topic with this one is difficult to do while still meeting the minimum word requirement, but I'll do my best. The average high speed connection is generally advertised to be around 1.5-3 mbs. There are two very important things to keep in mind about these speeds. Firstly, these speeds are usually the maximum connection speed. This means that your internet won't always; and indeed, may never, be at this speed. The second thing that some users don't realize is that these speeds are in Megabits per second as opposed to Megabytes. There are 8 bits in a byte, thus the speeds in Megabytes per second( a unit many users are more familiar with) are actually .1875-.375 MB/s .

Page loading time is an innaccurate and qualitative as opposed to quantitative way of checking your internet connection speed. One of the main reasons for this is that there are simply too many variables involved. The speed of the website you're acessing, the size of the website, your computer's quality, and the traffic that the webpage you are visiting currently has. Because of this, the best way to test out your connection speed is through downloads and uploads.

Download something of medium size. By medium size I mean something that is anywhere between 5 MB and 15 MB, assuming you have a high speed connection. If you're still on dial-up...well all I can say is that I'm terribly sorry for you. If your browser records the time it took for each download, you can look at that for the next part. If not, just take note of how long it takes. Don't browse the internet or do other downloads while doing this; we want an unadulterated estimate of your internet connection speed. After the download has finished. divide the size of the file by the number of seconds it took. Repeat this process a few times for different websites, and then average all of your results together. To increase the accuracy of these attempts, do the downloads at different times of the day. All of the aforementioned measures are designed to compensate for things like servers with low upload rates, periods of high traffic, and other uncontrolled variables of the like. If you want to get an even more detailed estimate; do the same download multiple times of the day off of the same site, average all of the results from that site, repeat for other sites, and then average all of your site averages.

You can try this at different times and on different days to test just how close your average is to the maximum speed that high speed internet companies boast. Its been my experience that most of the time, rates are fairly close to the listed maximum when on a site with a high enough upload speed. If there is too large a discrepancy between the max speed the company claims and the speed you actually get, you may have something slowing your computer down, like adware or even a virus. If you have a high download speed but low browsing speed, then it is very likely one of two things: 1) You're running Internet Explorer. Stop. Use Firefox or Chrome. Or anything other than Internet Explorer(well except for the AOL browser, that's even worse) 2) the second most likely possibility is that your computer just isn't that great. If niether of these is true...well you might have Spyware,Adware,or a Virus...or you might be running Windows Vista.

Learn more about this author, Shawn Schafer.
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