Strider's Bandwidth Busters

Time to test your Connection Bandwidth and see what it can do! Remember that what you are testing is not just the speed into your computer, but also the speed of the slowest link between you and the test site.

If what you are testing is not just the speed your ISP gives you, but also the speed of the slowest link between you and the test site, you should pick a test server as near to your ISPs gateway to the internet as possible. My server is in New England; the Speakeasy server linked here is in New York, although they have many others; the 2Wire, DSL Reports and MSN test servers mostly live in California.

How do you tell where the test server is, or the slowdown on the connection to it? You can run a command line traceroute on each of the test sites to see how many hops and which are the slowest jumps made. Or you can use any of the TraceRoute programs online or for download if you need more detail. I recommend using Ping Plotter for checking speed issues, a great little shareware program. For tracking the true source of sites or intrusions, NeoTrace is one of the best. As always, ask 3 techs and you will get 3 answers, so make your own choices; I am working on some tools to help with this question, and will link to them here when they are live.