What is your Internet speed?

What is your Internet speed?

Depending on your ISP, or Internet Service Provider, you are given a certain amount of allotted bandwidth based on what you are paying per month. For example, it might be 16 Mbps or 90 Mbps (8 bits equals a byte; A song that is 4 Megabytes would take approximately 2 seconds to download if your speed was 16 Mbps). When most users had dial-up, speeds ranged from a few Kbps to 56 Kbps. So, this used to take what seemed like forever to download.

Do you know what your current speed is? Have you ever had it tested? Not sure? You should be able to find out what your service plan offers on one of your billing statements. This does not tell you what you actually experience on a given day though. If you have a large number of users or devices in your home or office and these users happen to be on at the same time, the speeds you experience may be far from what you thought you were getting. Plus, wireless users may see as much as a 50% or more drop in speed when compared to wired users because of interference (microwave ovens, landline phones, thick shielded walls) in the home or loss of signal quality due to distance from the router.