Test Your Broadband Speed by BroadbandReports

Ever wonder what your actual speed of your broadband is (so that you know what you actually paid for)? Well there are some good ways to test it out, and post to your blog too 🙂

Broadband Reports (which still maintain their old URL www.dslreports.com) have this nifty tool. There are two versions, one is flash-based and one is java-based. The flash based one is fast but not so accurate, while the java one can measure even fiber changes. Here’s the result that the flash-based test give me:

1.1Mbps! Ooo… not so good – probably not the fat green pipe’s fault, maybe my dumb wireless router. Notice that in this case it’s tested from a server from SF, which is where I head to online most of the time anyway. You might get varied results.

Here, try it yourself:

[kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.dslreports.com/front/flashtest/speedtest.swf” height=”650″ width=”650″ quality=”high” wmode=”transparent” fvars=”extswfPath=http://www.dslreports.com/front/flashtest/&extDomain=maxonline.com.sg&extUserDomain=maxonline.com.sg&extUserID=
” /]

How about the Java version? Check it out yourself.

Why Broadband?

So here’s the thing. Broadband Reports is really a marvelous community for making broadband access available for everyone and help various communities in terms of information dissemination, promoting broadband usage. You think broadband internet access is already very prevalent? Think again. Here’s a selection of OECD countries with their penetration rates. Singapore penetration from IDA. Hear grassroots like Redesign Malaysia roar about broadband “For the Rakyat“. Maximum African speeds:

Research from ITU:

To me this is still very pathetic when we sing about ubiquity and freedom of access to the Internet. Worst, having access doesn’t mean having access at the service level demanded / paid for. This would be very hard to measure and can only be done by grassroots style community like Broadband Reports and Redesign Malaysia. After that a step 2 to clearly follow up with the lame service must also be addressed. Is it incompetent engineers? Is the businesses cutting corners? Is it the people aren’t willing to pay in the first place?

This new ballpark measure of the digital haves and the have-nots should be treated with more seriousness by all parties.

Oh ya check this out too. UFO anyone?

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5 Responses

  1. In antarctic, people have very fast internet access. I wonder how is the Internet Penetration rate is like? The E-Governance there seems to be quite interesting, for there is one article in IEEE digital library.

  2. The problem with the KL rollouts (you can ask anyone in the Klang Valley) is that the coverage is always limited. You can be in a township where your neighbor across the street gets it while you have to wait another year before someone lay cables. Maybe eventually everyone will be on WiMax or some large coverage infrastructure, but it sure can’t beat good cables.

    Speedtest is cool 🙂 See if I can get its flash later.

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