How to check the speed of the Internet on your computer or phone?
With the current high speeds of the Internet, landline and mobile, few people care how many megabits in the channel. Everything flies - there is no need to know the numbers. However, sometimes it is important to measure the exact connection speed - before contacting an ISP in case of problems, for example. There are several ways to find out your Internet speed, and we'll talk about them.
When we talk about the speed of the Internet connection on a computer, we often mean laptops as well. If we are talking about phones, then the group of related devices can definitely include not only smartphones, but also tablets, Android TV boxes and many other mobile gadgets.
We will not discuss the importance of high speeds. We will just tell you how to correctly, reliably and as accurately as possible measure the speed of the Internet. Important technical details to know and take into account
Since the Internet is a network of networks, when you run a test of the speed of your connection, in fact you are checking the limitations of several bottlenecks at once at all possible nodes on a specific route to the selected server. So the displayed results can match:
- The limitation of your local network. The most striking example is a wireless router. Even if the provider provides you with a wide channel, for example, 250 Mbit / s, and your router can only work at speeds up to 100 Mbit, then under no tests you will not get a speed higher than 100 Mbit. Moreover, it will definitely always be below 100 Mbps, since the common channel will be divided into several active users, if they are currently active.
- The capabilities of a network card. Yes, many modern laptops have Gigabit LAN cards installed. But at the same time, built-in Wi-Fi modules often work only in the 2.4 GHz band. Despite the declared speeds of 300 Mbps for receiving and 150 Mbps for transmitting, no real network card can produce such a result. You will most likely get a maximum of 80 Mbps. For high speeds without wires, 5 GHz modules (MIMO, so called 5 / 6G generations) are needed. In any case, it does not hurt to check the characteristics of your network card, perhaps it is simply not designed for high connection speeds even in physical local networks (for example, no more than 100 Mbps).
- The high-speed ceiling of the selected server. Even if we are not talking about a specific site to which hundreds or even thousands of clients can connect simultaneously (and the common channel in this case is divided among all), but about a large processing center data center, its channel is also not rubber. The more simultaneous active connections pass through one access channel, the lower the speed gets to each specific user. Many hosting companies forcefully "cut" the channel of each of their clients in order to guarantee at least some bandwidth to everyone else (so that one client does not take over all the bandwidth). Thus, some sites cannot provide download / upload speeds of even more than 10 Mbps.
- Restrictions of the provider itself. For example, some Internet operators openly stipulate in the contract that peer-to-peer connections (torrents) are a parasitic load, since they heavily clog the channel, so such connections are forcedly limited or blocked altogether. And even if you lease a 250 Mbps channel, then when downloading torrents you will most likely get a maximum of 8 Mbps or even less. Read the contract carefully before signing.
- Limitations of the network or its topology. The most prominent example is cellular networks. Here, too many factors affect the connection speed: the current load of the base station, the capabilities of the end device (smartphone, built-in / external modem, etc.), terrain features, the presence of physical obstacles in the signal path (walls, metal structures, etc.) .), as well as active interference (generators, powerful household appliances, etc.). Similar problems can arise in physical networks or their sections along the path of Internet requests.
response time (the so-called PING ) should be discussed separately. Even if you have a wide access channel (for example, 1 gigabit / sec), but the latency of requests will be large (50-150 milliseconds), then the general impression of the speed will be such that it "slows down". This is due to the fact that sites and online games will react to your actions much longer than you expect from them. The lower the latency / ping, the faster the response rate, since the forward and backward requests will be faster. Ping, in addition to the network topology and the technologies used, is often influenced by the distance of the server. The farther the endpoint of the request, the longer it will take to forward it. Excellent ping rates - 2-4 milliseconds.
And now directly about measuring the speed of the Internet.