What is the speed of the Internet and how to measure it?

Inexperienced users of the World Wide Web often wonder what the speed of the Internet is and how it can be measured. This article answers these questions.

Many representatives of providers, trying to sell the services of their company, beautifully paint all sorts of advantages and "goodies" of using the Internet from them. And how to find out what speed of the Internet is provided by this provider? Such information can be obtained immediately from the mouth of the manager, or by using a call to technical support. Most often these are standard 100 megabits per second, but what does it really mean? 100 Mbit / s is the maximum bandwidth for computer network cards , therefore, the limit for the speed of the Internet. At the same time, a person far from all this does not quite understand what all these megabits mean.

What is the speed of my Internet?

This indicator is measured by the smallest unit of information - bits per second. To make it easier to understand what a speed of 1 megabit, without having a broad knowledge of computer science, you need to imagine a usual song - they average 4-5 megabytes. Since the units of measurement are different, you need to change 1 megabit, dividing it by 8 (since 1 byte is 8 bits). Hence we get that the speed of the Internet is equal to 0,125 megabytes (125 kilobytes per second). With simple division, it turns out that this music file is downloaded in 40 seconds. If you download this file at the maximum possible speed of 100 megabits, it turns out that the song will appear on the computer in less than one second.

In fact, all these calculations are only a theoretical part of the question of the speed of data transmission, because there are many factors, because of which the real indicators may differ from the declared parameters. Even knowing what the speed of the Internet is, for sure it will not work out for the following reasons:

1. The load of the connection line can affect the speed. Some providers do not withstand a heavy load due to the simultaneous use of their Internet, so during hours of active network loading, the speed may decrease.

2. Poor connection quality can also spoil the speed.

3. A very important point is the channel capacity of the company that provides services.

4. By itself, the sites that the user visits are also very important. Some of them themselves are too congested or located on low-quality hosting, so they are slower to load.

Understanding what speed is and taking into account all its nuances, you can measure it with the help of various services, conduct several tests a day to measure the connection parameters in order to find some real average. Here, it should not be surprising that, possibly, the declared data will be slightly higher. Only in case of serious differences it is necessary to call technical support to find out the reason for such inconsistencies. Perform all the work necessary with the programs turned off, which use the Internet connection.