Help me make sense of my internet connection speed

[The_Eric]

I recently switched from a local microwave ISP to the 4th gen satellite service from Wild Blue/Exede.

The old microwave service, when it was running properly would give a ping time of ~10-30ms and download speeds of 768k. When it wasn't working correctly (more often than not) I'd see ping times completely through the roof and download times as low as 120k.

Enter the satellite service. Going into the deal, I knew that the ping times would average 800ms and they were advertising 8-12Mbps. Now that I'm hooked up, I'm seeing times/speeds that are all over the board... Like ping times from 10ms (not likely from satellite) to mid 900ms and speeds from 4Mbps to 25+Mbps.

I'm running XP SP3 and have tested on IE8, FF, Chrome and Speedtest.net mobile (via wifi). Typically IE and Chrome will give a ping time typical of satellite and the lower end of the speeds noted above. FF and the mobile will usually but not always run quicker pings and faster d/l times. I have tested the connection at work with the same mobile app and get very consistent speeds and ping times, so I'm not sure the mobile or wifi is the sole answer.

At any rate, the internet is faster now then we've ever experienced and using youtube as a benchmark, we can now stream any video at any quality level without buffering.

The only thing that I can add that may have an effect, is I have FF tuned up a bit, using some speed tweeks I found on the net. Still that doesn't explain the high AND low pings as well as the varying d/l times. If I had to guess, I'd say that speeds are in the 8Mbps range...

Can anyone shed some light on this?

 

[david_ES2]

Sounds like your sat ISP is not very consistent on bandwith and ping, meaning theres very little you can do about it, which can be a pain if you play online video games where ping is very critical, not so much bandwith

 

[dparm]

Don't bother with any of those so-called "tweaks" to get Firefox any faster. Most were proven to have no effect or to actually hurt performance. They were around years ago before 25Mbps to the home was affordable and they still exist now.

If the browser is truly the performance bottleneck, you need a faster computer.

Speedtest.net is not 100% reliable, either. It's really just measuring how fast your ISP is linked to that Speedtest server as opposed to all the other millions of devices on the Internet. If the Internet surfing feels fast enough, I would just leave things be, despite how subjective that is.

 

[ChrisW]

I've seen some software firewalls [from AVG, Kaspersky and Norton] cause some funky speed readings when testing my internet; I'd turn off my firewall temporarily while running tests and it was much more consistent.

Having been in the IT/IS field of work and having dealt with all sorts of commercial type internet circuits, anything wireless or satellite or the like had inconsistent response times and speeds for clients on site; tried to go DSL/something hardwired at whatever venue we could.

 

[azjake]

I agree with what the others have said. We have XP (2GB RAM) running on an emachines system I bought in 2009. We use both FF and IE8.
On speedtest.net our result with Cox internet is fairly consistent at around 27-30 Mbps

If my wife has been on the PC for an hour or more playing games, checking e-mails, facebook, etc. and then I get on I notice the system seems to run slower probably due to memory (computer memory) fragmentation. Progammers who write software are not the greatest in freeing up memory once you exit a game or software program you're in. Because of that I often just do a quick reboot and that speeds things up.

 

[The_Eric]

Thanks for the input guys, I appreciate it.

dparm, you're right, when I did this it was back when I had dial up/verizon 3g and speeds were slower, however I do seem to recall one of the articles stating that XP wasn't optimized for broad band speeds? Maybe that was addressed with subsequent service packs?

Chris, I wish we had a good hard line connection available to us, but being out in the sticks means that's not going to happen. Our existing phone lines are suitable for 911 use and barely support dial up (like 16-24k connections). DSL is a no go and the phone company isn't interested in changing it at this time.