Is Your ISP Good Enough?

Ever wondered if you ISP is providing you the amount of bandwidth that they claim they do? Well recently I needed to upgrade my broadband plan to include more download and faster speeds. My ISP here in Oz is Telstra Bigpond… somewhere back in the archives I did say I was going to dump them but never did… Well the cable plan I’m on now boasts up to 30 Mbps, however there are a number of factors that Bigpond say may affect performance, like location, the bandwidth of the site you are downloading from etc, you get the general idea.

So I decided to test my bandwidth using Speedtest.net and on my iMac using the built in wireless and I got the following result. I managed to get up to 5131 kb/s out of a possible 30000 kb/s. Although the speed is pretty reasonable it’s not that good compared to what is available.

I figured that maybe the wireless connection on my iMac could be part of the problem. So I fired up another box I have that is wired directly to the router and got the following results.

Wow, just by plugging in directly to the router, I was able to manage another 4000 kb/s. So it seems that these factors claimed by Bigpond might just have some substance. In any case 5000 kb/s is still pretty good in my book and 30 Mbps is a good marketing strategy by Bigpond even though you may never ever see it.

How good is your ISP?