Tip of the Month for August 2000

Checking Internet Connection Speed

When you connect to KIH or KYOL in Lebanon, the maximum speed you can attain is 54 BPS. In reality you can only hope to attain a connection in the high 40's. The farther away from town you are, the slower your connection will probably be.

On most computers, once you connect to KIH/KYOL a small "computer-to-computer" icon will appear in the bottom right corner of the Start bar. Double-clicking this "computer-to-computer" icon will show you how fast your connection was when you first logged in to KIH/KYOL. Keep in mind that connection speeds can fluctuate. While you may connect at a slow speed, your modem may up shift to a faster rate as you go through the Internet. Other modems may connect aggressively, but downshift to slower speeds as your Internet connection continues. The important thing isn't connection speed, it's getting the file/picture/information you want as quickly as possible. So while you may show a 36k connection, you might be able to download things faster than someone showing a 42k connection.

When you "surf the net" your speed depends on many things, such as your computer's top speed, the condition of the phone lines from your location to KIH/KYOL, the number of people using the resources at KIH/KYOL, the number of people using the resources of the Internet in general, and the speed of the computers you are accessing on the Internet. When you go to a site such as Yahoo.com, you go through your ISP (Internet Service Provider such as KIH and KYOL), though a router, to another router, to another router, etc. You may be bounced through over a dozen computers before you reach Yahoo.com. If you go to the same site a few seconds later, you may go through a dozen entirely different computers to reach the same destination. This can be demonstrated with Yahoo's "Traceroute" service at http://net.yahoo.com/cgi-bin/trace.sh. Type in any web address (for example, "mmprogramming.com") and "Yahoo Traceroute" will show you a list of all the computers it had to go through to get there. Some routers prefer to remain anonymous so asterisks will appear as "Traceroute" tries to get a name from them.

Now that you are informed about the many obstacles to a quick connection, we'll show you how to test your actual download speed. Paul's favorite speed tester is at Computing Central. A small JAVA applet (a small harmless program) is run that starts a hidden stopwatch and begins to download a file. Once the file is downloaded all the way, the watch is stopped, and your connection speed to the file is calculated. Because you connect to the file via a different route each time you try to go to the site, you may want to try the speed test several times to get a better estimate of your actual Internet speed.

The speed test is available here: http://www.computingcentral.com/topics/bandwidth/speedtest.asp

If you believe that you have a modem or other hardware problem, please feel free to bring your CPU to M & M Programming, Inc., 110 North Spalding Avenue, Lebanon, KY.

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