Little is sexier than telling a friend or loved one, Hey, can you give me a minute?
I have to finish testing my download speeds, then we can head out to the party.
(Call them up to ask if you forget.)
For the purposes of this article, lets assume you purchased the speeds of up to 150 Mbps package.
Grab your fastest gear.
Preferably, thats a desktop or laptop that has a wired, gigabit connection to your router.
In a perfect world, your router will do all the testing for you.
Whats slowing down your connection?
Maybe your ISP is suffering some online grid congestion at the moment.
Maybe someone has hacked into your system and is eating up your connection by running a huge BitTorrent server.
Maybe fast.com is screwing up, and you should verify the results onanother speed-testing site.
Then, test your web link in the same fashion once a week or so.
(Thats assuming they can connect to your router at speeds faster than whatever your ISPs plan promises.)
Are you seeing the same, slower speeds throughout the day?
Then plug your desktop computer back into your router, and your router back into you modem.
That hardware firewall is important.
If you call your ISP, what kinds of speeds are they seeing on their end?
(In other words, is this athemproblem or ayouproblem.)
You might have to replace your modem or your router.
Maybe new wireless access points around your area are causing a lot of interference.
Perhaps something is going haywire with the Ethernet port on your desktop PC.
Maybe a recent driver update for your wireless card did something screwy.
Your Ethernet cable might be going bad.
By checking your networks speeds on a regular basis, youll always know if youre getting the best performance.
