speedtest vs heanet

[onitis]

hi there. i'm interested to see what the differnces are between this speedtest and an ftp download from heanet.ie.

my service was upped to 6mb but i've only seen this speed once, earlier today while on the phone to ntl.

the heanet test got me full whack but on later tests it went up and down from 150KB/s to 750KB/s but averaging around 500KB/s mostly.

http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/TheOpenCD/releases/3.1/

ntl said heanet was the best test and that other speedtests such as this one were not accurate. but i seen the full 6mb earlier on this site, and just got 4.5mb now.

webpages sometimes load very slow and i cant say ive noticed a difference betwwen 2mb and 6mb in general. ive worked with a dedicated 5mb line about 2 years ago and i have yet to see the same type of performance on my home service.

the tests here have been very varied. the tests from today (15/07) are done with direct connection to the modem. oldrr tests are off the network through the router.

Date Download Speed Upload Speed Qos RTT Maxpause
15/07/2006 18:53 4481 kbps (561 KB/s) 281 kbps (36 KB/s) 38 % 46 ms 287 ms
15/07/2006 18:30 1378 kbps (173 KB/s) 344 kbps (43 KB/s) 26 % 36 ms 209 ms
15/07/2006 18:24 1153 kbps (145 KB/s) 344 kbps (43 KB/s) 75 % 53 ms 296 ms
15/07/2006 18:23 1453 kbps (182 KB/s) 316 kbps (40 KB/s) 23 % 37 ms 223 ms
15/07/2006 18:20 1595 kbps (200 KB/s) 403 kbps (51 KB/s) 31 % 26 ms 123 ms
15/07/2006 186 1223 kbps (153 KB/s) 320 kbps (40 KB/s) 59 % 22 ms 224 ms
15/07/2006 186 1151 kbps (144 KB/s) 359 kbps (45 KB/s) 83 % 51 ms 171 ms
15/07/2006 183 2549 kbps (319 KB/s) 347 kbps (44 KB/s) 13 % 43 ms 192 ms

the best test:

15/07/2006 17:49 7428 kbps (929 KB/s) 304 kbps (38 KB/s) 76 %53 ms55 ms

and previosly:

13/07/2006 17:34 1192 kbps (149 KB/s) 443 kbps (56 KB/s) 74 %40 ms91 ms
10/07/2006 18:20 1488 kbps (186 KB/s) 97 kbps (13 KB/s) 63 %19 ms446 ms
12/06/2006 1564 kbps (196 459 kbps (58 67 %32 ms59 ms



any comments?

[mickoneill30]

For me, I've noticed that speed test websites don't give me a good picture. For example on this site the test always says my link is < 1Mb/sec. It's never given me anything more. So as I'm paying for a 2Mb link I'd be pretty pi**ed off if that was all I could get.

But there are various factors in the equation. Speed of your link, route to the test site and how busy the testing site is.

I think a good test (for reasonably advanced users) is to try a few torrents from a few different users. I'm pretty frequently able to max out my link and get >200KB/sec down and anything from 100KB/sec -< 200KB/sec up. The reason torrents get this is because I'm connecting to many different users, their traffic is coming over many different routes and the torrent app will keep on trying more users until my link is maxed out. Really the only bottleneck on a well seeded torrent should be my link. So if my link was really <1Mb/sec I'd expect to see torrents working at a max of about 128KB/s down.
Many users have problems configuring port forwarding and getting good seeds so this isn't a test for a novice. With an incorrectly configured setup I could get 20 - 30KB/sec and if I didn't know better I'd blame the link.

[blacknight]

There are a lot of factors that will affect your results, however if your ISP is peering at Inex you will get a better result.

Chorus aren't peering there at present.

[mickoneill30]

Fair enough. But maybe you should put up two speedtests with different providers. My ISP musn't be peering with Inex either. But I see a lot of posts of people complaining about it based on just the stats from the tests here.

That's not your problem (Blacknight) more a novice user problem but there are plenty of those. You say in your description of the speedtest
"Most of the other bandwidth tests you may find are based outside Ireland, so their results are not as accurate for Irish users."
That statement MAY be 100% correct. But it doesn't mean that the speed the users sees is 100% correct. It never is no matter what test they use and it should be only one in a list of things to try to determine your speed.

With all that said, if your pings are crap, your browsing speed seems really slow and this site reports a woeful speed then you've got a crap line.

[blacknight]

Who is your ISP?

[mickoneill30]

Irish Broadband. I was kind of keeping that quiet because I know lots of people have issues with them and I didn't really want to attract the attention of those that will just pop in saying that they're s**t.

I haven't always used IBB, I was in Oz till April this year so I used a whole different broadband provider, different testing sites but similar issues.

[onitis]

ok, thanks for the infos..

sorry i haven't got back on this...

the saga continues..

here's the latest...

my network is a mixture of mac and pcs..

in the last 2 weeks, the speed of the macs has been dreadfull.. i have performed every test possible. i discovered recently that the pcs were getting good speeds... over 4Mb/s... the macs were 1Mb/s and below... this was through the network.. modem>netgear ata> netgear wireless router > switch for two desktops mac & pc (wired to router)

i went direct to modem with mac powerbook and got the same low speeds (between .5Mb/s and 1Mb/s) ... a PC laptop gave me 4.5Mb/s


this is very strange...

my next test is to bring the mac to a net cafe or another network and try it there. this is a new problem, it has never happened before..

any ideas?

[mickoneill30]

The simplest thing I can think of is the speed of your NICs. I've found big differences before when a NIC was set to Auto and then 100/Full. If it's set to Auto now try the 100/Full option on your Mac.

[onitis]

i figured that out.. the ethernet card speed that is.. switched it to 100/full on the 'wired' computer.. it made no difference..

but the airport doent allow such a seeting to be made so it would explain why the wireless speed is also so slow..