Is your internet slow?
Have you ever experienced a slow website or browsing experience and wondered why? At www.networkmagic.com we have a great tool to help you discover why the internet is slow called www.speedmeterpro.com. It works with Network Magic and will show you the bandwidth consumption of each PC and your router.
The internet can be slow for several reasons:
1. The website you are loading is slow. You might try some other sites to see how fast they come up. Google is usually a good one to try to see how fast your connection might be. If it's slow to come up then it very likely is not the websites you’re visiting, but something else.
2. The internet service you use is slow. You can find how fast your internet service is at www.speakeasy.net/speedtest. It's a pretty cool test and will give you a sense of your actual bandwidth for upload and download. You can compare that to what your broadband provider tells you.
3. Intruders or neighbors using your bandwidth. To see who else is on your network you can get use the Network Magic service to scan your network. You can signup at Network Magic and you will see a map of who is on your network. You can then kick off intruders if you have a supported router for that feature.
4. Something on your network is consuming a lot of bandwidth. This is where www.speedmeterpro.com can help by showing you bandwidth consumption by PC and for your network. The typical bandwidth hogs that slow your network down are applications like Bittorrent, XBOX live, downloading streaming video or just large downloads.
5. It's a bad time of day. If you use cable internet service like Comcast and it's a time of day when your street may have a lot of people using the service at one time. This will slow down your service because there is only so much bandwidth for the segment. Not a lot you can do about this except switch to DSL where you get a dedicated amount of bandwidth.
I am curious to know how many of you have this problem because there is more we can do to help in these situations. Drop a comment to let me know.
Comments
Hey Tim, great post, really helpful. The speedtest is a really great utility. There is also a site that does VOIP weather. This tests for ping time. It is called http://testyourvoip.com and it also does http://testyourvideoip.com
These are really doing "ping" testing since sometimes, it is not speed, but turn around time.
Posted by: Rich Tong | April 4, 2006 11:38 PM
Usually my Comcast connection works really well but a few weeks ago I had intermittent slowness or it would completely not work. It was really hard to track down. I ended up calling Comcast and they tested the connection and said it was dropping packets so something was wrong and they'd send a technician out in a few days. Turns out they had upgraded their system in my area and I needed a new modem from them for it to work correctly. So yes, having an application to let me test my internet connection and report on whether I'm getting below average speed or whether something else is going on is a great feature.
Posted by: home networking news | April 6, 2006 05:50 PM