Everyone wants the fastest broadband connection. It's easy to get excited with the thought of a 200MB/s connection as, think about how quickly you'll be able to download files and stream video from YouTube? Problem is, with the race to secure the fastest broadband, it's too easy to forget that 95% of the Internet is plagued with slow websites, poor bandwidth between continents and people attempting to stream movies, rather than buy them on DVD.

The result is that we often receive emails and letters from our magazine readers complaining that download from a particular server is slow, even though they have a 24MB/s broadband connection. Reason is that the server is located in an obscure territory, is served by a slow connection and, worse, if there are, say, 50 people connected to the server at the same time as you, the server bandwidth is shared equally between those 50 users. This means that you could quite easily be downloading at 25KB/s, rather than 1.5MB/s. That ultra fast broadband doesn't look quite so promising as advertised?

DownTester 1.05 is a free tool which you can use to test your broadband connection against various remote servers, located in different territories, so you can see how different it is downloading from a server in Japan, compared to Germany. This might help you make more informed choices in the future.

DownTester link.

14 May 2009