Bias in speed tests

I almost forgot one funny little discovery I made about speedtests. Before I get to that though, let me explain a little abotu speedtests. As the name implies, they are designed to determine the upload and download speeds of whatever internet connection you happen to be using at the moment, usually in the form of some little web applet. I tried them all when testing my new FiOS line out. I'm paying for 15 Mbs down and 2 Mbs up, and I'm told I share my line with no one, so any decent speedtest should reliably show that these are the speeds at which I am connecting. The same logic is true for dial-up and DSL connections, but not cable connections, which are usually shared among many users and line speeds drop as more users logon. Anyway, back to the subject. As I said, I tried many speedtests; Speakeasy's, the dslreports tests, Visualware's, and of course, Verizon's.

So here's the deal, most of the speedtests out there aren't designed to give accurate readings for internet speeds much above what you get with a cable modem (~5 Mbs). This is in fact what I discovered with most of the speedtest sites except for the one from Visualware, which pegged me at 15.1 Mbs down and 1.8 Mbs up, a fair margin of error. The most interesting result came from my FiOS provider themselves, Verizon. According to them, I'm getting a blazing 49 Mbs down and 6.1 Mbs up! That's nearly 35 Mbs extra down and 5 Mbs extra up speed they are giving me for free apparently. That or they are just lying to try and make me feel that much better about this FiOS service? hard to say, but if you don't believe me, I took a screen shot of the output page (but unfortunately, the graphic didn't come out).



I just tried this test again now, and its telling me I'm maxed out on both down and uploads. Methinks a bug lies within.

FiOS: update I

So its been some number of weeks since I had Verizon's fiber optic data and TV service installed in the house. They call it "FiOS" (the installers told me its pronounced "fye - ous"). Anyway now that I've had some weeks to get the hang of it, I thought I'd let people know my thoughts. First, the data part (aka the intarweb) is totally bitchin'. Its hard to get a bead on what my true download and upload speed is though as I get radically different readings from the different speedtests available out there, so I'm not sure what's going on with that. A friend of mine said he'd try some of the same speedtests with his cable connection at some point. Perhaps he could report results in the comments? The only thing about the internet connection is that Verizon is basically Macintosh-computer stoopid. The techs came into the house and took one look at my Airport wireless transmitter and said, "will that work with our system?" Of course it will you dumbasses. Anyway, part of their standard operating procedure is to hook your main connection into a wireless router (I think its Cisco branded) that has 4 ethernet ports on it for connecting to your home computers. That kinda sucked for me because I have this whole nifty printer sharing thing going on with my Airport and I knew the Cisco router had no such funtionality. After doing some more speedtests, I basically just daisy-chained my Airport downstream of the Cisco router so that I effectively now have two wireless networks running off of the same internet connection. So I browse the net with the Cisco router network and when I have to print something from one of the laptops, I just switch networks over to the Airport. Its not an ideal solution, but it will have to do until I figure out a way to get the routers operating on the same network, or find a way to get the Cisco router to do the printer sharing I can do with my Airport.

I haven't yet played online video games with this new connection, but I will soon, maybe in another update. At that time I may also go on and explain what I've learned about wireless connections vs ethernet-wired connections and how that led me to wire every important room in my home with an ethernet jack.

Update II will deal with the TV service, and it will be long (because there is plenty to complain about)

US Constitution: Shot to Death in a No-Knock Raid

Forget Israel, forget Iraq, and forget Afghanistan. The biggest threat to the American way of life is no-knock raids.

FiOS

Today, the Verizon people are installing FiOS data and TV in my home. I'm pretty excited about it, but there were a few things the sales person didn't make very clear to me. First of all, the data all needs to run over ethernet wires. So if you currently have your house nicely wired up with a cable jack and a phone jack in every room, you'll have to run additional ethernet jacks to all those same rooms or go entirely wireless for data. I already do the wireless thing but I like having internet-capable jacks in every room as well, so I will have some work to do. Secondly, the TV signal still runs over the normal cable wires, but a set-top box is required. I fucking hate set-top boxes. I'm not sure I really need it actually as I have a very high tech TV, so I'll have to test that out myself I think.

I may update this later as the day progresses...

I am a 35 year old man

As of last Saturday, July 1. Damn that sounds old doesn't it?