Tech Blog

[#1]

I'm sure we all remember the days of dialup Internet. I'm not going to say "fondly", because no way could I ever go back to those days. I remember getting high speed DSL access at home in 1998-99, and how awesome that was for surfing and email. When I moved to Salt Spring Island, BC in 2000, I was forced back to dial up. Oh the pain. It was another three, long years before we got high speed Internet on Salt Spring. This most isn't about reliving the nightmare of trying to get a dial up connection on Salt Spring, it's how to test the connection you have.

Let's start with the basic, upload-download test. I've been using SpeedTest.net for a long while now and I've found it gives pretty consistent and reliable. Here are the results I ran tonight (using a test server here in Vancouver):

The only flaw in using SpeedTest is that Shaw's Power Boost can throw off the results. Power Boost works by accelerating the download speed of the first few megs of a download to about 30 megs down. The upload speed should be pretty accurate. These data are only half the equation. The real key isn't the upload and download rate, it's the latency and jitter in the stream. You can have screaming fast downloads, but if your pings take a while to be answered, using online video will pretty much rot. The folks behind SpeedTest have rolled out their newest test: PingTest. Like SpeedTest, PingTest uses servers (the closer the better) to analyze your connect. What it's doing is checking the responsiveness of your connection. It's the ability to quickly send-receive data is crucial to VoIP and video. Here is my test that I ran tonight:

Not too bad, eh? But what if the results weren't so good? Could you do much about it? Maybe. Sometimes you can tune your network settings, but I've had mixed results doing that (so if readers have some good tips I'm all ears). Let's just start with getting these benchmarks, sometimes that's good to start with.