About once a week I visit one of several sites to check the up and down speeds for my high-speed Internet access through Comcast. Today’s site was the [1] SpeakEasy speed test site, which offers the option of using any of eight locations to test your speed. In doing my tests, I always do a test of all test sites available, recording the up and down speeds from each site, then finding my average speed. For today’s test, it looks like I should hope every server I connect to is located in New York City, as my connection to the NYC SpeakEasy test server there came back with the fastest results. Overall, though, I can’t really complain about the speed of my modem. Back when I first got a computer, a TRS-80, back in 1979, I had a coupler that allowed me to connect to a limited number of computers — but the coupler connected at 1200 baud. That is a crawl, even when compared with a 33.6 modem still in use on some computers today. Anyway, here are my results from today’s speed test, which, if I get the gumption one day, I will make a screencast and post it, showing Comcast’s File Kicker in action. It’s funny to watch, but makes these results somewhat misleading. The file kicker from Comcast kicks in after the Comcast server recognizes a file is over a certain size. It kicks it for just a few seconds, speeding up the download, but doesn’t last for the entire duration. In marketing the file kicker — a speed booster, basically — Comcast makes it sound like a large file will be downloaded very quickly. In reality, it will download only slightly faster. There’s nothing significantly faster about the file kicker. Looking at the results, it seems my real average download speed is probably around 1,875kbps or so.

Download(kbsp)	Upload(kbsp)	Test Server Location
1890		275		Seattle, WA
2328		284		San Francisco, CA
1793		284		Los Angeles, CA
1912		288		Dallas, TX
2915		286		Chicago, IL
3231		286		Atlanta, GA
4438		288		New York, NY
3750		287		Washington, DC
______		____
22,257		2278
(Total of all download and upload speeds, as listed above)

Overall download speed of 22,257kbsp divided by 8 (total number of test sites) equals 2782.125 Overall upload speed of 2,278kbsp divided by 8 (total number of test sites) equals 284.75 Be sure to visit SpeakEasy’s speed test site today. Simply click the chicklet below to visit the page. Find out how fast your connect really is, not what the marketing people (who forget to mention all the fine print), want you to believe.

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