I love to find deals. I love to find bargains. But when it comes to Internet service the old adage “You get what you pay for” just doesn’t apply. If fact I’d be thrilled if I actually got what I paid for.
You may not know it, but there are some major shifts going on right now in our country’s communication patterns. As more of us in the United States make the switch from traditional phone and TV service to their Internet counterparts, our critical dependence on these services is increasing at a dramatic rate. As more of your day revolves around Internet delivered content and services, your bandwidth demands will increase an your broadband internet connection will become too slow for normal everyday use.
Recently I heard an amazing statistic. Netflix movie streaming is now more than 20% of downstream Internet traffic during peak US evening hours. When you combine that with the growing popularity of Apple TV, Google TV, and Internet based television programming it all boils down to one thing: Your Internet connection is not big enough for the impending wave of online content.
This past month I’ve been playing with the Logitech Revue Google TV set top box. And first let me say that I love the wide variety of Internet content available, the built in applications, and the huge potential I see with this product. But with that said, it was immediately apparent that my Internet connection was not big enough to handle the real-time video streaming consistently. Waiting for video to download and buffer is the last thing I want to do when sitting down in front of my HDTV.
Now I’m not on your typically 1-2mb DSL connection. I’ve got an upgraded 7mb wireless broadband plan. You can imagine my surprise when my connection started to falter. So I started do some checking.
The first thing I did was run a speed test at www.speedtest.net. This website will test the download and upload speed of your connection as well as the latency using ping test. Latency is the amount of time for information to travel round trip between two points on the internet. These numbers can tell you what kind of bandwidth you’re really getting from your ISP. While I’m on the 7mb plan, after running this test several times over the course of a week, I never got a download number over 3mb.
Ping and PingPlotter
The next set of tests I ran was to check the consistency of my connection. Another potential problem with Internet connections can be small intermittent drops in connectivity. While networking technology can recover from these drops, it can still cause downloads to pause and buffering to occurring in video streaming. From the command prompt I ran a continuous ping test to Google with the command: “ping –t http://www.google.com”, (hitting control-c stops the test). The results were surprising. About 3-6 percent of the time the test would fail. Using the free version of PingPlotter (www.pingplotter.com) I was able to run the test over the course of a week and could easily see that my “always on” internet connection had small outages at various times of the day. Bottom line: my connection was flaky.
In the end, I contacted my ISP and notified them of the problem. And while they are working to solidify my connection, I’ve decided that if I want the best of the Internet in the future I’ll need to upgrade to a bigger connection. My advice to you: Check out your ISP to make sure you’re getting what you pay for.
Tyler Whitaker's Infotech 
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