wide open west

[neil odonnell]

i have just recently signed on for broad band cable.(WOW)
supposed to be 500bps (whatever that is) How can I check actual speed? With dial up, all i did was right click on icon and properties.
I have win 98
thanks for any help.
neil

[Rodney Hills · Accepted solution]

Try either grc.com or dslreports.com

They can test the actual speed.

-- Rod Hills

[Jeff Schussele]

I use dslreports.com - Tools -> Speed Test

Try it from several of their servers & at different times of the day.

Rgds,
Jeff

[S.K. Chan]

There are a lot of tools out there. These are the ones I used to check my DSL speed.
http://bandwidthplace.com/speedtest/
http://www.dslreports.com/stest

[Dave Unverhau_1]

Neil,

Check the support website for your broadband access provider -- they may have a link to some sort of tool you can download to provide a status check.

Also, now that you're "hardwired the the info superhighway", you should consider investing in a "cable/DSL router" and/or some decent firewall software, to make it harder to attack your PC from the outside.

Regards,

Dave

[harry d brown jr]

500 bps? As in Bits Per Second? Nothing like stepping back into time, like during the days of 300 and 1200 baud modems!

Even at Bytes Per Second, that's only 5000 baud! Smoke signals would be faster :-))


Hopefully, for your sake, you meant 500K bps!

live free or die
harry

[neil odonnell]

thanks to all for your help.
those two sites reported 452K bps,/284K bps. Another site
reported 489.7K bps.
Wonder why download is faster?

neil

[harry d brown jr]

Usually they try to limit traffic in one direction so they can make the other direction a wider bandwidth. It's normal. If you plan on HOSTING a site, and you are offering a lot of downloading, then you might want to negotiate a bigger "pipe".


live free or die
harry

[Patrick Wallek]

When dealing with most any broadband Internet connection, be it DSL or Cable, your downlaod speed will almost always be faster than your upload speed.

Why, you ask? Think about what you do most of the time when surfing....Downloading a web page, downloading music, a movie, etc. Very rarely do you upload very much data at all, unless you are sending e-mails with attachments, but those generally go pretty quick too. So it is normal for download to be quicker than upload.

I would question your cable provider about the speed though. I recently got cable and dslreports.com shows my upload speed at 2 Mbps. I would think you should get faster than 500 Kbps.

[Bill Hassell]

Most home DSL connections are actually ADSL where A=asymmetrical. Unlike a modem where the channel (the phone line) is symmetrical, the asymmetrical broadband format uses a wide range of energy to provide a high speed connection. The mechanism is pretty complex when compared to a modem but suffice it to say that symmetrical DSL is MUCH more expensive.

DSL lines are 'hot' in the phone cables (lots of high frequency components that can couple into other lines) so conventional copper cables are limited in the number of DSL lines for a given phone cable. This is why you can't get DSL but your neighbor has it. Once fibre at the curb exists in your area, these limitations go away.

[Dave Unverhau_1]

Also, for high speed access via cable, I believe that the uplink/downlink imbalance arises from the manner in which the bandwidth is allocated: As it was explained to me, one TV channel on the cable is set up as a broadband downlink to a neighborhood and another is chopped up into a number of discrete "subchannels" (frequency division multiplexing). The cable modems negotiate with the local router for one of these slices and this uplink channel is "owned" by the modem until a period of disuse causes it to be returned to the pool of available channels. This is why a cable modem in an "overbooked" neighborhood may occasionally be unable to get a connection.

I haven't experienced this in a long time, so I don't know if it's because the cable provider is now more careful to provide enough of a frequency allocation for all of the subscribers on a local subnet or if the "throttling" that's built into the newer cable modems allows for a smaller frequency slice when the subnet gets congested. (I suspect the latter...)

fwiw,

Dave

[John Bolene]

Sounds like you have a good connection.

A lot of cable companies limit download to 384K and upload to 128K.

I normally get around 400K down and 256K up.

It also depends on how many people are on the cable at the time and the speed of the server you are connecting to.

There are a number of links in the internet chain, any of which can slow down.

[Chuck J]

I've got an Alcatel ST 510v4. It gives you the connection speed in the GUI. Currently it says 576 down and 256 up. The actual downloads speeds though are not that good. 30-40kpbs p/s if you are lucky. It costs ??23.44 per month unlimited downloads/uploads and of course is always on.

Chuck J