It is important to check your internet speed so that you know whether the level of service that your ISP is providing you meets the advertised level.

     My favourite way to check your internet speed is to go to speedtest.net and pick the closest city to your current location.  To keep things fair, you should try to ensure that you are not using the internet with any other applications (such as P2P applications) or from any other computers on your network.  The easiest way to check this is unplug all your other computers and pull up Task Manager and go to the Networking tab (ensure the Graph is at zero prior to launching the bandwidth test).

     Be careful  of bits vs. bytes (e.g., megabytes vs. megabits).  If you see an image such as the following, you are seeing kilobytes per second (not kilobits per second):

     The above image shows a transfer rate of 124 kilobytes per second.  Note that most download transfers are measured in bytes per second while most throughput calculations are done in bits per second.

That's pretty much it.

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