Have you checked your Internet connection lately?
There are quite a number of free services that will tell you how fast your connection is. The best one I have found is MySpeed. MySpeed offers in addition to telling you the speed of your connection, a choice of locations around the world - which provides some interesting results - but more importantly it gives you a quality of service percentage - this is very revealing in my case.
My ISP is Free.fr. I pay €30 per month for what in France is called an ADSL (i.e. broadband) service and I get an Internet phone line with which I can make free calls around the world to landlines. Just now, I ran a MySpeed test with Paris as the location. MySpeed reported a nice download speed of 1.9Mbps. The upload speed, which is always pretty poor, was 142Kbps, actually about the highest I have ever seen! Typical, obviously they knew I was about to write this article... Quality of Service was given as 79%. Quality of Service in this context relates to the breaks in transmission - the speeds are actually averages, fine when downloading data, but useless when trying to listen to an online radio broadcast or for VOIP conversations like Skype. This is why the QoS figure is more important than the actual average speed.
With the dismal service I receive from Free, I have seen QoS figures as low as 15% which is an absolute disgrace, and frequently when listening to radio broadcasts, the sound cuts out.
Now compare this rubbish with a newly announced Japanese service reported in Slashdot.
A Japanese company has announced a new service for domestic subscribers - 1Gbps - send and receive. The service includes a telephone line and will cost the equivalent of $56.60 per month - say £30 or €38.
There are quite a number of free services that will tell you how fast your connection is. The best one I have found is MySpeed. MySpeed offers in addition to telling you the speed of your connection, a choice of locations around the world - which provides some interesting results - but more importantly it gives you a quality of service percentage - this is very revealing in my case.
My ISP is Free.fr. I pay €30 per month for what in France is called an ADSL (i.e. broadband) service and I get an Internet phone line with which I can make free calls around the world to landlines. Just now, I ran a MySpeed test with Paris as the location. MySpeed reported a nice download speed of 1.9Mbps. The upload speed, which is always pretty poor, was 142Kbps, actually about the highest I have ever seen! Typical, obviously they knew I was about to write this article... Quality of Service was given as 79%. Quality of Service in this context relates to the breaks in transmission - the speeds are actually averages, fine when downloading data, but useless when trying to listen to an online radio broadcast or for VOIP conversations like Skype. This is why the QoS figure is more important than the actual average speed.
With the dismal service I receive from Free, I have seen QoS figures as low as 15% which is an absolute disgrace, and frequently when listening to radio broadcasts, the sound cuts out.
Now compare this rubbish with a newly announced Japanese service reported in Slashdot.
A Japanese company has announced a new service for domestic subscribers - 1Gbps - send and receive. The service includes a telephone line and will cost the equivalent of $56.60 per month - say £30 or €38.
I'd pay that I think, just to get the service I am already paying for!
Until the next time
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