How fast is my Internet connection speed? |
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| by Oscar Sodani | |
| October 24, 2006 | |
 Oscar Sodani is a founder of Help2Go and owner of Help2Go Networks, an IT consulting firm in the Washington D.C. area. Oscar holds the CISSP certification as well as industry certifications from Microsoft, Cisco and Novell. There are lots of web sites out there that will test your Internet connection. Your best bet is to try several, because if you have a very fast connection, your results may vary by how far the web site's server is from your home/Internet provider. An important thing to keep in mind is that bandwidth is measured in kilobits per second (kbps) - one bit is simply a binary 0 or 1, so transferring one kilobit means that you transferred 1000 0s or 1s. One megabit per second (Mbps) means roughtly 1,000,000 0s or 1s transferred every second. However, when you normally think of the size of files, you are not thinking in terms of kilobits or megabits - you think in terms of kilobytes (KB) or megabytes (MB). Since it takes 8 bits to make up a byte, you should divide the speed of your connection in bits per second by 8 to get a real-world idea of how long it would take to transfer a file. An example: I have a 1 Mbps internet connection. I have a 10 megabyte file that I would like to download. Will it take 10 seconds? No. Because of the difference between bits and bytes, it will take longer. A 10 megabyte file is actually comprised of roughtly 80 megabits. So, with a 1 megabit-per-second connection, it should take roughly 80 seconds to transfer the file. If you are completely confused, check out our tutorial on bits and bytes. Speed Testing Websites
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