Friday, November 5, 2010

Internet =/= Speed

I had a recent incident yesterday that pushed me to right this article. I was asked by a someone I know "How do I make my computer faster?". I quickly responded to this by explaining that he can change his HDD to an SSD, or upgrade his RAM, or even delete files he doesn't use anymore. After about 45 minutes of him organizing and deleting files, he asked me "So now will my websites load faster?". I asked him what he meant by that, and he said explained that he wanted websites to load faster then before and thought what we were doing would help. I told him no, websites load only as faster as the wireless/direct connection is. He then proceeded to get a little mad at the fact that we had deleted all this stuff. I calmed him down and told him not to worry about that. Here is the point that I am trying to get to. Even though your computer may have 4 GB of RAM, a 3GHz CPU, an SSD, and an amazing graphics card, that does NOT have to do with your internet loading faster. And even if it does effect the load times, it is minimal. If you want things to load faster, you get a better internet. Having all these amazing components only helps in boot up, loading applications, and general browsing of files. Internet is completely separate. If you want to know how fast your internet is, I suggest you go to SpeedTest.net. I went there just now, waited about a minute or so, and got my results. Please keep in mind my results reflect my wireless capability, not my hardwire capability.
Fast right?
Lets just review this real quick. Download speed is how fast you CAN download information. Why do I say "can"? The reason is because you will never hit that speed. That speed is the top speed you can hit when there is almost no one online. Same goes for upload speed, which is how fast you send information out of your computer.  Then, ping is what takes the uploaded information to the server and brings back your new information to download. After ping the process starts all over. If you internet has less then 10MB/s download, there is a good chance that is the reason you have a slow internet. Post your speeds below, lets see who is faster.

~Dave

1 comment:

  1. I'm about 25 down and 3 up. Note however, that the speed you get off of speedtest.net varies depending on which server you test it off of. When I tested off of a lower tier server, but in a location closer to me, I only got 9 down. However, when I tested using a Comcast server, I got 25 down.

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