All about ping?

[Josh Brumpton]

So my internet is terrible here, honestly it is literally dial-up. So here it is...

http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/2835915767

I'm on a 1mb/s plan.... I KNOW, I dont wanna hear wow's or whatever. But if i upgrade to the 5mb/s plan, I'm scared it wont even change a thing, a friend did it and it didnt change anything, so the company stopped charging him so much because he wasnt getting what he was paying for. I was wondering if Ping could be a sign of potential, could i get faster internet by upgrading my bandwidth. And how do companies upgrade my bandwidth.

Thanks
here we go, the 5 min wait for it to publish.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Ping is a measure of the time it takes for a round trip to the server and back. It has very little to do with the connection quality, other than that radio signals (cellsites/satellites etc.) are generally longer.

That's not quite literally dial up.

They increase speed caps - the DSLAM on the other end of your DSL connection limits you to a certain connection speed if they tell it to.

 

[Josh Brumpton]

Okay, well im paying for 1mb/s , so have they purposely set my DSLAM to such a lower speed? Or does this happen naturally or...?

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Yup, they purposefully set it to 1Mb/s (though you will always get lower than that, because that's an ideal situation. Queuing and other stuff drops it below there, like with WiFi).

It's called differentiation. Like how there's no actual difference between an i5 and i7, except that Intel cut a couple of traces and disabled hyperthreading.

 

[Josh Brumpton]

Ohhh interesting. thanks But my friend upgraded his plan/bandwidth. But it didnt actually change, was this just there fault? Are there other ways i can get a faster connection, powerline adapters?

 

[Someone Somewhere]

It's possible that either a)they didn't have enough backhaul (bandwidth between the exchange and rest of internet), or b)the phone line was so poor that it couldn't handle 5Mb/s, or c)his modem didn't support whichever version of DSL is needed.

Ideally you use a direct ethernet connection from your modem/router to your computer. Powerline/WiFi is a bit more unreliable and can be bandwidth limiting, though it's rare for them to be that slow.