Thanks to Brian Long for researching this guest column about assessing your home Internet connection.
Think your home internet isn’t as fast as it should be? See the article below for details and a walkthrough of how to test your speed.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2048594/how-to-test-your-home-internet-speed.html
You’ll need to know a few things:
- What speed did your Internet Service Provider (ISP) sell you?
- Are you on a wired or wireless connection?
- Is anyone else in the house sharing your internet?
- Are you using a VPN ?
Example: let’s say your ISP is providing a “100Megabit” internet connection. This doesn’t mean that you will always get 100Mb of speed in both directions (upload and download.) In most cases for home ISP’s, the download speed will be faster than upload. On a 100Mb connection you may see speeds of 20-70Mb download and only 2-20Mb upload speed. Other factors can make that number lower than “advertised”. Wireless internet is not quite as fast as wired. If possible, test your home internet with a wired connection to find out your “best, possible” speed. Then you can compare that speed result to a wireless test. As noted in the article below, wired is faster, but wireless is certainly more convenient and may be “fast enough”.
https://www.howtogeek.com/217463/wi-fi-vs.-ethernet-how-much-better-is-a-wired-connection/
Are you the only one using the internet at your home? If someone else is home and streaming Netflix, downloading/uploading files, or in a video call, etc., your speed will be affected.
The last thing to check is VPN. If you have a VPN connection going, disconnect it for the test.When you make a VPN connection, it affects your speed by 5-20%. Details of why VPN affects speed can be found in this article:
https://hackernoon.com/does-vpn-slow-down-internet-4ba14ae60e3
If you find your home internet isn’t as fast as you think it should be, first try a reboot of your networking gear (Router/modem.) Leave it powered off for at least 30 seconds and test again. Still slow? Contact your ISP’s support. They may know of a outage or problem in your area or walk you through some of these steps to assist you.