Inexperienced users of the World Wide Web are often interested in 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 kinds of advantages and "goodies" of using the Internet from them. And how do you know what Internet speed is provided by this provider? Such information can be obtained instantly from the mouth of the manager, or by using a call to tech 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 Internet speed. At the same time, it is not entirely clear to a person far from all this 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 megabyte is, while not having extensive knowledge of computer science, you need to imagine a regular song - they "weigh" 4-5 megabytes on average. Since the units are different, you need to change 1 megabit by dividing it by 8 (since 1 byte is 8 bits). From this we get that the Internet speed is 0.125 megabytes (125 kilobytes per second). With a simple division, it turns out that this music file downloads in 40 seconds. If you download such a file at the highest possible speed of 100 megabits, it turns out that the song will appear on your computer in less than one second.
In fact, all these calculations are only a theoretical part of the question of data transfer speed, since there are many factors due to which real indicators may differ from the declared parameters. Even knowing what the speed of the Internet is, for sure it will still not work out for the following reasons:
1. Link congestion can affect speed. Some providers can not withstand heavy loads due to the simultaneous use of their Internet, so during hours of active network load 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 the services.
4. Of course, the sites that the user visits are also very important. Some of them are themselves too overloaded or located on low-quality hosting, so they load more slowly.
Understanding what speed is and taking into account all its nuances, you can measure it using various services, conduct several tests per day to measure connection parameters, in order to find some real average indicator. One should not be surprised that perhaps the declared data will be slightly higher. Only in case of serious differences should you call technical support to find out the reason for such discrepancies. It is necessary to carry out all work with turned off programs that use an Internet connection.