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[MomEm]

I have a cable modem. 5m down 256k up.

So perhaps this is a dumb question, but exactly how do you know how fast your interenet is?

 

If I right click on my wireless network connection icon, it says "speed 54MBPS".  How do I know what I should be getting and how do I know "up" and "down" that Bo mentioned?

MomEm

[DJDOG]

There's something you have to understand when it comes Cable, DSL, Satelite.

Cable Internet: Cable is a shared bandwidth, Which means everyone near you in your area is on the "same network" your 3+ Mb Down and 256+ Up is all shared therefore you will be getting slow speeds on some days and great speeds on another.

DSL: Yes it maybe a little slower than Cable, but the bandwidth as explain "Cable" it's Dedicated too you NO one else uses your bandwidth in your area. You purchase the Basic plan that's all your speed.

Satelite: Only need this if you can't get DSL or Cable as in living in the Country as they don't run copper or fiber lines out their (They will eventually.) - Yes if it rains your internet can go out as well as your TV.

If you're on high speed and your internet is dropping a lot and you're going thru a wireless connection as in thru a router, It's prolly not setup properly or it's not secured.

You can never know what your true speed is because different servers will get you different results from speedtest websites, That's why they have test mirrors whatever closest by you.

If you want to get an idea, Try: http://speedtest.net - Make sure you have the lastest Flash Player otherwise it won't work, If you do you will see a "yellow triangle" that marks where you're closest to.

Hope this help's.

[MomEm]

OK, I did the speedtest, my results were 1480 kb/s download and 2369 kb/s upload.


Do I compare this to my speed 54mbps to understand?  I guess I don't know what a "good" number is, like I don't want to be paying Comcast $$$ and be getting the same speed I could be getting from dialup for $ or DSL for $$.

Thanks for enlightening me!
MomEm

[billylumbergh]

Wow, that is so strange billylumbergh....    We have Charter and ours seems to finally have gotten better after 4 long rotten lousy frustrating years of problems...

Maybe they took your good equipment and brought it out here and took our bad equipment and put by you...

I know they have had a couple of interuptions that they say was a cable cut somewhere out of the area on a main line...    That has happened several times over the 4 years.

Maybe they need to bring in another feed from somewhere else to build a better system...   for what we pay they could wrap the line in titanium

Well they've had lots of problems with routing issues leaving the Charter network. True it hasn't always been their fault. Like I think it was Tuesday night when anything that went through Level3 in Chicago was REALLY slow. Traffic should be easily rerouted through a backup connection, but it wasn't. They also have problems all the time with modems all of sudden losing their provisioning, which from what I've been told by techs, is because somebody who doesn't know what they are doing tries to add a MAC in and when they do they dump all of the addresses that were in there. Something to do with more than one person being in there at a time or something. So it's done in batches, but when somebody works out of that routine, it screws everything up.

I should point out too when there's problems, I usually speak with the Charter Business people as they'll actually tell you what's going wrong, rather than the useless helpdesk people when you call the residential support. We have a Charter Business account in an area very close to where I live so usually when mine is acting up, so is that connection, so I can get away with calling them instead.

And speaking of they money they rip off of consumers, now they're selling "wireless networking" for $9.99 a month. So you pay $9.99 a month for a wireless router that only works for up to 4 devices I believe, when you could buy a router just about anywhere for $30+ and have as many devices as you want and not pay the monthly fee. Yeah that's seems like a GREAT deal. I realize they are trying to take care of those that aren't knowledgeable enough to buy their own and set it up, but they are so commonplace now, I think anybody can follow the easy setup guide they all come with.

[billylumbergh]

Satelite: Only need this if you can't get DSL or Cable as in living in the Country as they don't run copper or fiber lines out their (They will eventually.) - Yes if it rains your internet can go out as well as your TV.

Satellite usually has pretty bad latency, too, meaning not so good for games.

[billylumbergh]

OK, I did the speedtest, my results were 1480 kb/s download and 2369 kb/s upload.


Do I compare this to my speed 54mbps to understand?  I guess I don't know what a "good" number is, like I don't want to be paying Comcast $$$ and be getting the same speed I could be getting from dialup for $ or DSL for $$.

Thanks for enlightening me!
MomEm

The number you're seeing (the 54Mbps) is the speed at which your wireless connection to your router is running. Really, you'll never even get that speed back to your router for lots of different reasons that you probably wouldn't care about.

Your cable provider will also give you a speed, usually like 5Mbps or 3Mbps, which you'll probably never reach either. Running the speed tests at http://speedtest.net or http://speakeasy.net/speedtest will usually give you a good estimate of your speed, but there are so many factors involved, you can't  take what speed they give you as a concrete number. You're always going to have a slower upload speed on cable services, too, mostly because of the way it all works. I think you may have reversed your numbers in the speed test, or there was really some sort of issue with the connection to the test server when you ran the test.

They usually give you the speed in Kbps, too, so you have to convert that to Mbps if you want to compare, with 1Mbps = 1024Kbps.

You're always going to get better speeds on cable or DSL than on dial-up, which is called 56Kbps but it technically can't go that high, and you'll really only get 44Kbps if you're lucky most of the time. DSL you would have to check into to see if it's available to you since it doesn't go the distance of cable.

[DJDOG]

OK, I did the speedtest, my results were 1480 kb/s download and 2369 kb/s upload.


Do I compare this to my speed 54mbps to understand?  I guess I don't know what a "good" number is, like I don't want to be paying Comcast $$$ and be getting the same speed I could be getting from dialup for $ or DSL for $$.

Thanks for enlightening me!

Actually you don't compare them the "54 Mbps" refers to you as your local lan (Local Area Network), If you're on a router that could be the case, If you're not cable modem's now in days have a build in rouuter into it. (How do you know? Do you have more than 1 Ethernet Cable hookup in back of your modem? If so, You can hook up more than 1 PC to the same internet. Just buy another Ethernet Cable also referred as CAT5).

There's a difference between KB and kb and ISP's usually refer as Mb (Megabits, NOT Megabytes) Therefore 1480 Kb/s is about 1480 kilobit = 1.44 Megabit or
0.1806640625 Megabyte, Anotherwards it's slow but faster than Dialup and no offence you even if dialup was faster you wouldn't want to go back, It would tie up the phone line and would have these outrages charges on your account.

Also when you look at the results page on speedtest.net you can use the "Fourm Link" and post the image.



I'm on SBC/AT&T (Whatever you want to call them) highest DSL package, Why mine is fast.

For some humor: http://colbertondemand.com/videos/The_Colbert_Report/The_new_ATandT

[the nosh]

comcast...money is no concern...at the moment.

[spenc119]

Currently have Comcast 6mbps...switching to Verizon DSL 3mbps (way cheaper unbundled than Comcast).

And an easy way to get from kilobit to KiloByte is just to divide kb by 8.  So 4mbps is 4000kbps / 8 = 500KBps.

[www.BarackObama.com]

Cool! Here's mine, that was with 802b wireless too.



Gonna go try it on my hardline now and see how that is...

[www.BarackObama.com]

Here's the hardwired computer...

[Uncle Rico]

Comcast.  Fast as hell.  They should send you a tub of vaseline with your bill though, cause you're gonna need it....$$$$$$

[m0x]

Comcast.  Fast as hell.  They should send you a tub of vaseline with your bill though, cause you're gonna need it....$$$$$$

That is a wicked-fast upload speed. Did it bugger up?

[Lady Arbella]

This is on my laptop using a wireless router

[MomEm]