now most of you will latch unto a server and use their speed test...this will give you a test to that particular server and lots of testers walk away convinced thats the speed they have....
thing is, thats the speed you have to one locality...
determining true speed of your connection can only be done at your own isp....thats the speed you have from your house to your isp servers....from there, the variances of the internet takes over and you really have no way of asessing just how fast you are really surfing...
there are a couple of very important factors that can get in your way...
router faults....sometimes, gateways are not behaving when you escape your own home and they might be dropping packets...
sometimes your isp equipment might be adding latency because of multiple users being on at the same time..
sometimes its your setup thats buggering things up too....
so you need to test a couple of things....
one is tracerouting....look for packet loss to several difeent sites and ensure that it isnt the first three hops thats letting you down...if it is...phone your isp....find out whats happening, especially if you see real latency or dropped packets....
do some file downloading and uploading to see how good you compare with the advertised speeds..
next, use the tool mentioned below to do a nice speed test on multiple servers...this ought to show performance for worldwide if you do the comprehensive test...
and it will generally cover the things above...except the gateway packet checking.....
it will be nice to show up the different users on the same service and then you can really compare...
post your results in here...
go here and get the proggy from the download section....
http://www.broadbandspeedtest.net/