Note that the speed between your machine and any remote site is going to
be the minimum of the available bandwidths on all of the links between the
two.
  On dial-up, that's almost always the connection between your phone and the
ISP's modem.  Occasionally, it's the link between the destination web site
and their ISP.

  The other links in the chain tend to have much higher TOTAL bandwidth,
which your traffic is sharing with everyone else who is trying to pass
traffic across that link.  So at any given moment, the bottleneck *could* be
a problem where one ISP hands traffic off to another, or within a given
ISP's backbone network.
  You can get a rough idea of the path from you to a website using
traceroute (which Windows spells "tracert").  Note that return traffic from
the web site to you may follow a slightly different path.

  You can't really guarantee that traffic conditions on the net are going to
be the same from one test to the next.  You probably need to take three
measurements or more, at different times of day, and average them.
  Even then, a slowdown might not be your link, and might not be due to
traffic -- it could still be due to a problem out in the Internet somewhere.

David Gillett


On 19 Dec 2003 at 8:00, Peter Shkabara wrote:

> I have ADSL and tried toast.net for a speed check. It came in lower than
> what mcafee.com shows, but not a big difference. Toast showed 800kbps and
> mcafee read 1mbps. To me it is disturbing that my speed is going down - it
> had been at 1.5mbps when I first got it a few weeks ago! Still much better
> than the old dialup 33kbps.
>
> In reference to my speed drop, I suspect that phone line noise may be
> contributing to the problem. I get some static on the voice side (it happens
> after a rain). What else can cause such a slowdown in DSL?
>
> Peter
> -----------------------------------------------
> The NoSpin Group
> [log in to unmask]
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > I would test several different sites and see if your downloads look
> > consistent on Toast.net.  Remember the old sage "if its too
> > good to be true..."
> >
> > Mike Scott
>
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