How to Find Out If You’re Getting the Internet Speed You’re Paying For

How to Find Out If You’re Getting the Internet Speed You’re Paying For

There are dozens of ways to check your Internet connection speed.  You should check your Internet speed occasionally to ensure you’re getting the speed for which you’re paying good money. And if you’re not, you should find out from your ISP (Internet Service Provider), why not.

So let’s get started with a few reliable ways you can find out what your Internet download speeds are (as this is what you’ll want to know, not so much your upload speed).

You can check your Internet download speed easily. If you use Google Chrome or Firefox with Google as your default search engine, just type SPEEDTEST in the address bar and press Enter. You’ll see some information and a “Run Speed Test” button.

Now, my ISP once told me that this particular test was not very accurate, but I think that’s because it didn’t say what my ISP wanted it to say at the time. They recommended the Ookla Speed Test at https://speedtest.net/.

And then we discovered another test … FAST! It’s owned by Netflix. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? We don’t know, but one thing is for sure, it’s a quick way to find your Internet download speed.

If you are looking to check your Internet speed quickly without any webpage clutter, you won’t find any cleaner, quicker way than by visiting Fast.com.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, right? Anyway, we’ll show you:

What can I say? I can certainly read that. While we are only showing my download speed, it’s what most of us want to see when we want to know how fast our connection is. But, if you want to see more details like your upload speed, no problem. Just click “Show more info”.

You’ll see my download speed is 590 Mbps according to FAST.com.

MBPS vs. Mbps

And just for the record, Mbps is not the same as MBps. Mbps is “Megabits per second” not “Megabytes per second”. So, what’s the difference? We are thrilled you asked!

A Megabit is 1/8 as big as a Megabyte. This means that to download a 1 MB file in 1 second you would need a download speed of 8 Mbps. Mbps means megabits per second – not megabytes per second.

All speed test sites show your internet speed as “megabits per second” not “Megabytes per second.”

As you can see from the screenshots shown here, you can get vastly different results depending on the speed testing site you use. We recommend you use two or three different sites and use the average of them to certain your true internet speed. 

Having fun? Then wait… there’s more!

If you are having fun testing your internet speed (bless your heart) here are some other sites you can visit to check your speed or lack thereof…

Xfinity
https://speedtest.xfinity.com/

Speakeasy (love the name!)
https://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/

Google Fiber 
https://fiber.google.com/speedtest/

And there are dozens more – if you’re having fun with this, search “SPEEDTEST SITES”.

Wait, What is jitter?

OK, now you’re wondering what the heck is jitter. You’d think, especially in Speakeasy it would be a dance like the Jitterbug, but you’d be wrong. According to Speedtest…”Jitter: Also called Packet Delay Variation (PDV), jitter frequency is a measure of the variability in ping over time. Jitter is not usually noticeable when reading text, but when streaming and gaming a high jitter can result in buffering and other interruptions…”

So what is considered a high jitter? Well, we are so glad you asked because not being gamers, we didn’t know but Dialpad does. “Jitter is measured in milliseconds (ms), and ideally, an acceptable jitter level should stay below 30 ms. Anything higher than 30, and you may start to see issues with audio or video quality.”

Why it’s important you have an idea of what your download speed is.

You can see, in all the screenshots we’ve shown you in this article, that my internet speed (generally my download speed), based on several different testing sites is somewhere between 421 Mbps and 590 Mbps. So I know that I am averaging close to the 500 Mbps internet speed that I’m paying for.  

Are you getting the internet download speed you’re paying for?

If you’re not sure what speed you’re paying for, check with your Internet Service Provider to find out.

In this article, we showed you several FAST ways you can make sure that you’re getting the speed you’re paying for.