Bonneville America Forums Forums Off Topic Discussion Forums Lounge Download /Upload speeds

Here is a link to a free speed test. www.speedtest.net web page I use it if things seem to move slowly or if I don't think I'm getting the speed that the provider is charging for. It is good to know. My business partner has dsl and was paying for 768K but after running the speedtest discovered he was only connecting at 50-60K. A simple off and on of the dsl modem reconnected at 720-760K. I pay for the fastest speed our antiquated rural system can support (500K), but it is blinding fast compared to the dialup (30-50K) that had been choking me for years. I realize that 500K is slow by most standards, but considering that we still climb the pole to answer the phone, 500K dsl is a Godsend.

Hey cool site...

8.5MB/s to Sydney, 10.4MB/s to Auckland, but only 7.3MB/s to Melbourne. Weird. And of course to Los Angeles it was a pathetic 2.something MB/s, but that's bouncing of dozens of satellites to get there.

Doesn't the phone stop ringing before you get up the pole? Maybe you can get a weatherproof answering machine for your pole!

My rural wireless set up hit Sydney at 1200kbs/download but the assymetrical side was a pathetic 150kbs on the upload side. Still, it is wireless and I don't have to climb any poles. All in all a very cool and useful site, thanks for the link.

I just have to laugh when people complain about the connection speeds today! When I first started in computers (in the late 70's), you were lucky to get 110 baud! I ran a BBS in South Florida that used a 300 baud dial-up, and was overwhelmed when they came out with 1200 baud modems. The data center I worked in had 'high speed' dedicated lines and could pump data through at 4800 baud (and you needed a CSU/DSU and modem costing several thousand dollars). Of course, that was also back when 16K of memory was just over $100, and a 5 Megabyte hard drive (14" platter @ 300 RPM) was right around $6,000.

Cheers,
Brad

PS: For those of you too young to remember, baud is 'bits per second', and you need a minimum of 10 bits per byte

You should have your telco talk to Plateautel. They have us on a repeater that sometimes gives us 1240 KBPS download. Then, there are times when the local fedlots and dairies upload their daily or weekly reports. Then, there is a 2 to 4 second ping time to the nearest node. They have won some awards for providing DSL to us poor country folk who live beyond the normal reach of DSL. The bad part is having to go over to wind the crank on the modem to get connected.

Thanks GB. I'll talk to Embarq's (my local phone company and ISP) data tech guru and see what he says.