How to Find Out the Speed of a Wireless Connection

Video Transcript

"In this clip we're going to show you how to find the speed of a wireless Internet connection. I'm not employed by or affiliated with any of the websites or products demonstrated today. Through the graphic representing the different kinds of services available from the bottom much as the old 14.4 modems, the old telephone modems bring you up to applications used by the military and I'm not available to try their systems or certainly needed by a private citizen. And if you look in the middle of the chart you'll see that you have satellite providers at the bottom. And then you have DSL and then you have cable modem and that's sort of the way that the speed work with the various services. There's some overlap but again satellite being the slowest, DSL being next fastest with cable modems currently probably the fastest available with the general public. One of the most important things with wireless is to make sure you're getting all the speeds for both uploads and downloads that you're paying your provider for. Here we're going to select Speedcast.net. Its just one of many services available along the Internet. But we're using this because its a nice, easy graphical tool to sort of check on to make sure that your computer is receiving all the upload and download speed that you're paying for. So we're going to test today signal between services going in our current location which is an Sacramento. And what happens is Speedtest.net will start pinging our location. And as they do that we'll see that the speed that we're paying for currently which is 1.5 kilo bites per second is the speed that we're actually able to download information out. Next SpeedCast.net will check our upload speed. Here we're going to find that in fact our upload speed is substantially below what's being advertised and below what I'm paying for. The nice thing about Speedtest.net is that they may go to a overview on your results page and show you what speed you've been able to download and upload and the distance of the service that you are paying from. And that's how you find out the speed of a wireless Internet connection."