how do i compute the true speed of a advertised high speed connection?

[chronic9]

my RR line is getting slow on me and they "cant" fix it and dont offer any faster plans. So i am looking to switch for something faster.

I am looking at Verizon business DSL since it seems to be pretty fast and the cost difference is small. so here is the advertised rate - Up to 3M/768K do i have to devide this number by 8 to get the real speed?

i also searched up covad and some other companies and all of their speeds are 1500/400, i remember someone telling me that that is a kilobits per second? and needs to be devided 8 to get kilobytes?

so what the deal?

 

[Duster]

you can look at http://www.dslreports.com/

and the look left for tools scroll down and hit speed test

 

[hokatichenci]

Those numbers are given in bits, not bytes. There are 8 bits to a byte, and most measurements you see (as in web downloads) are given in bytes. so 3megabits is (3/8) megabytes (*1024 = 384kilobytes). With TCP/IP overhead its a little less than that usually for real world speed. I have yet to see end user DSL/Cable advertised as anything but bits.

 

[_Durandal_]

http://www.dslreports.com is by far the most frequently used, and probably the most accurate...at least if you go through the speakeasy test. Just make sure you have Sun's Java installed on your machine, or you'll get a big red X where the testing console is .

Some other tests you can try are:

http://www.bandwidthplace.com
http://www.aroundcinci.com (look on the top of the page for the speed test)

 

[chronic9]

ya i used DSL reports to find covad and such. So is verizon business DSL in bits too? its only 60 bucks a month and i pay 45 for my shity RR line.

 

[killa62]

ya i used DSL reports to find covad and such. So is verizon business DSL in bits too? its only 60 bucks a month and i pay 45 for my shity RR line.

look at speakeasy, their broadband is very nice. I've been a happy speakeasy customer for 3 months.