Tuesday, March 11, 2014

How to do internet performance test on your own

Having trouble with your internet connection. Well, what most of us do is just type google.com to check if internet works fine or not and call customer care to fix this issue. Else, some of them look into modem and check for DSL – LED light and if it blinks then there is some issue with your connectivity (should remain ON, always). These may not always work and the issue might be something else.
Sometimes your internet will be up and running but might be very show. You can check your internet speed just to make sure if your internet service provider, as promised is providing you with the right internet speed or not. Check out my article on how to perform internet speed test. But this will just let you know about the internet speed and not how good your internet is performing. So, this cannot be considered as a complete internet performance test.
I have got internet connection speed of 2Mbps. Even though internet speed test showed the right promised speed, I still had issues with connectivity. To do a complete internet performance test, I used ‘PingTest’. This test shows complete details at packet level. What this test does is it will identify a suitable server closeby. This will be done by pinging each of the (predefined) servers and measuring the time taken for each ping. Once this is done it will send packets of data to this server and will check if all the sent packets are received or not.
internet performance test
Image: PingTest
Note that once you run the test you may be asked to install the latest version of java software. This is needed to run the test. But you can skip this and still proceed with the existing version of java and still perform test. You get an option to rate your ISP at the end. As you can see in the image above, there was zero packet loss, but ping took 72 ms and jitter of 4 ms. Also, a grade will be given by this tool and anything above B grade is good enough. 

Your ISP might be having their own tool to measure. So, next time you call up customer care you can tell them what exactly the issue or why it is slow. If they say the speed is what they had promised, give them more details on Jitter, Ping etc. They will surely register your complaint. Give it a try and do an internet performance test on your own next time you have an issue.
Do internet performance test on your own here: [Link]
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