Internet Tips: Juice Up Your High-Speed Internet Connection
Make high-speed connections even faster; donate spare CPU power.
Scott Spanbauer
From the March 2001 issue of PC World magazine
If you've recently moved to a high-speed
Internet connection, you're undoubtedly finding new and
frivolous ways to put the additional speed to work.
Downloading digital movies, streaming the BBC World
Service, or listening to Radio Estonia are just a few
examples. But as the novelty wears off, one question
inevitably arises: Can I make it go even faster?
Sure, you can download a 400MB file over a
cable modem connection in less than an hour, but if it took
only half as long, you'd have yet more time to download
other stuff that you'll probably never get around to using.
It's likely you can squeeze more performance--maybe a lot
more--out of your high-speed link with just a few clicks of
your mouse.
Many Web sites offer to tell you your
connection speed, but the tests they use aren't always
accurate. Microsoft's MSN
Computing Central Bandwidth Speed Test and
DSL Reports' speed-test
page gauge your download and upload speeds
by timing the transfer of a small file to and from your
computer. While this technique provides a general speed
readout, the results can fluctuate dramatically. You're
testing the speed of the entire connection between your PC
and the test site's server, and neither you nor the Web
site has any control over the efficiency of the routers in
between. Also, testing a small file can lead to inaccurate
results, and if that file is stored in your browser's
cache, the results will be muddled further. Over several
minutes, MSN clocked my cable modem connection at anywhere
from 850 to 1250 kbps. While DSL Reports indicated steadier
speeds in the vicinity of 950 kbps, there's no assurance
that either service is accurate.
To get a more exact measurement of your
connection speed, transfer a large, noncompressible file,
such as a multimegabyte .mp3 or .zip archive file, between
your hard disk and any nearby server that you have access
to. The home directory that your ISP provides, an office
computer, or a nearby FTP server are all good choices.
Download and upload the file four or five times, and track
how long each transfer takes. To find your connection speed
in kilobits per second, convert the file size to kilobits
by multiplying the number of kilobytes by 8, then divide by
the transfer time. We'll use an 8MB file as an example. A
megabyte is 1024 kilobytes, so our 8MB file is 8 times 1024
times 8, or 65,536 kilobits. If the 8MB file takes 1 minute
and 40 seconds to download (100 seconds), divide 65,536 by
100 to get the per-second transfer speed. In our example,
the connection is running at approximately 655 kbps. Try
the tests at different times of the day to detect speed
troughs. The wee, wee hours of the morning will likely be
fastest, and weekday early evenings the slowest.
If that's too much math, let your browser do
the gauging for you. Both Internet Explorer and Netscape
Navigator do a pretty good job of tracking download speeds,
which their download dialog
boxes report in kilobytes per second. A
120-kilobytes-per-second transfer speed translates to 960
kbps. That's decent cable modem performance, but something
tells me I could do better.
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