What do the scores mean?

[mjhaston]

I'm happy with my setting, I just want to understand my speeds!

Here are my test scores :D

I ran the test on the speedtest site:

Test running..Downloaded 60900bytes in 280ms
Downloaded 696000bytes in 3130ms
First guess is 1778kbps
fairly fast line - now test 2mb
Downloaded 1679100bytes in 5050ms
Upload test not enabled

** Speed 2659(down)/na **
(At least 53 times faster than a 56k modem)
Finish.


But what does that mean? On download tests I'm flying at around 320 kbps, but surfing gets a tad slow at times. Are the above scores more the surfing type up/down scores?

I'm a newbie..be gentle.

[blebs]

It means that you should give me your connection speeds so I can be back where I was 2 months ago! :D

Honestly, your speeds are good and the net is messed up. Have you not noticed that it gets even slower around 2pm to 11pm or so and even worse on the weekends?

I think alot of the problems are the ISP's that are going belly up and buyouts that are trying to re route traffic and congesting everything right now.

What kind of speeds are you getting on normal browsing?

[mjhaston]

I'm not sure what my normal browsing speeds are or really how to test them. I know my downloads are super fast and I'm really happy with that.

I also understand that when I'm on something like Morpheus, I'll only download as fast as the other person can upload. I guess I just was wondering about normal browsing, but then I'm at the mercy of the net traffic and server.

Just trying to get an overall understanding of all this bandwidth stuff.

[blebs]

I'm trying to think of the best way to explain it to you and I really can't. It's one of those topics that is affected by everything from your computer to your ISP and every router and server in between you and the net and then some.
Your downloads from fast servers will, in most cases, be really fast, which can give you a mixed feeling because you see that speed and somewhat expect it to perform the same when browsing the web and thats just not the case. There are just so many variables that come into play. You wouldn't happen to have neotrace express installed? It's a neat little FREE program that you can use to trace route almost any IP address or website and it visually shows the routes all along the different routers and such.

check into it here! (http://www.neoworx.com/products/ntx/)

[mjhaston]

OK, I've installed NeoTrace....now what?

It did nail my IP and one of my works IPs. I guess I could check out some of the IPs that ZoneAlarm is collecting!

[blebs]

It's nothing special, but it will give you the idea of where your packets are going and through all the routes it takes to get to the destination. The other nice part is being able to see the tracert results and who owns the domains in case you need to complain sometime. It just gives you the visual of what the tracert command at the dos prompt does. I'm still trying to find a better way to explain this so it's easy to understand. ;)

bandwidth

The amount of data that can be transmitted in a fixed amount of time. For digital devices, the bandwidth is usually expressed in bits per second(bps) or bytes per second. For analog devices, the bandwidth is expressed in cycles per second, or Hertz (Hz).

The bandwidth is particularly important for I/O devices. For example, a fast disk drive can be hampered by a bus with a low bandwidth. This is the main reason that new buses, such as AGP, have been developed for the PC.