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 sellservices 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 it's 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 Internet speed. 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 smallestunit 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 Internet speed 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 onlythe theoretical part of the issue 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 congestion of the connection line can affect the speed. Some providers do not withstand the heavy load due to the simultaneous use of their Internet, so the hours of active network loading may slow down.

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 considering all of itnuances, you can measure it with the help of various services, conduct several tests a day to measure the parameters of the connection, in order to find some real average. Here it is not surprising that, possibly, the declared data will be a little higher. Only in case of serious differences it is necessary to call technical support to find out the cause of such inconsistencies. Perform all the work necessary with the programs turned off, which use the Internet connection.