How to See Your Internet Speed: 4 Useful Tools

See internet speed it will serve to understand if the one you hired is really the one you have when surfing online. This is especially important if lately you have found your Internet slower than usual.

At reasons for this slowness they can be varied and it is important to understand whether they are your responsibility or not.

4 Reasons Why Your Internet Is Slow

An older and slower computer may no longer be able to keep up with the technological requirements for smooth navigation. You software and applications use more and more resources and memory so that communication between computer and server is fast. That speed can die right away on your device.

If you are accessing through a device infected by malware or another type of virus, even if you haven’t noticed anything in the applications yet, it may already be slowing down. And here you should see the speed of the internet. While accessing the web, your device may be performing other procedures at the same time that affect your performance.

If multiple devices at home are doing downloads very heavy at the same time or if someone else in your building is using your Internet improperly, the browsing speed is compromised.

If you have contracted an Internet with a certain speed and when testing it you realize that you are almost always surfing at half that speed, know that something is going wrong on the operator’s side and that you have rights as a consumer. Seeing your internet speed will help you eventually complain.

According to ANACOM, the National Communications Authority, when the consumer signs a contract to have fixed Internet or Wi-Fi, he has the right to be clarified about the minimum speed value that he is guaranteed, what speed value he can obtain regularly when you access the Internet and what is the maximum speed your Internet can reach.

Why so many values? Because the speed advertised by the operator may vary depending on the traffic management that the operator is obliged to carry out. This is because we are not all connected at the same time, at the same time and doing the same thing with our Internet, but it may even happen that we are at any given moment.

It is up to the operator to manage these usage peaks and ensure that the Internet reaches everyone within the contracted conditions. Therefore, there is no way to do the test and immediately understand if this is where things are failing.

How to test internet speed?

We have already realized that the browsing speed can vary greatly depending on the type of equipment you are browsing and the type of operation you are performing, so it is advisable to meet some requirements before starting the test to see the speed of the internet.

First, you have to choose one of the devices that are usually connected to the Internet to do the test with it. All others must be turned off, even the TV. Once the device has been chosen, you must connect it to the router by cable or, if you are testing via Wi-Fi, physically bring it closer to the router that provides the Internet.

The last preparation step is to turn off all programs and applications that may consume Internet in the background on the device you will be using for the test. No Spotify, videos streaming, video calls, program updates and not even the antivirus. Just leave the navigation page open where the site of the test you are going to run. Now all you have to do is use one of the four free tools that we suggest below.

4 tools to test internet speed

1. NET.mede

ANACOM itself has in its site a test to measure internet speed. Very intuitive and with notes that help the user to understand the results, this test allows checking the speed and conditioning situations. After the test, you can still access a page with suggestions for what you can do if the result shows that your Internet speed is really low.

two. speedtest.net

This is probably the most popular test available. online to check your internet speed. Very easy to execute, it can even make an estimate, if you enter the data of the speed you contracted, of what you might be losing in terms of speed.

If you want to have this test always available on your smartphonethere is a version mobile that you can install on your device.

3. speedof.me

Considered by some specialized press as the best test currently available, Speedof.me is a test that tries to replicate the real world of navigation and driving conditions. download by making a series of files, of different sizes, travel between the server and your device under test.

It may take a little longer than the others, but the end result is a graph that shows the different speeds of the various tests performed and that you can even compare with previous tests done by the same site.

4. speedmeter

The Speedmeter was developed in Portugal by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and, despite requiring Flash authorization for Mac users, it works flawlessly and you even get a page where the whole process is explained so you know what to do. will happen when you press the start button.

Internet speed test results

All the tools that we suggest will offer results in a few minutes, if not seconds. They will show you values ​​in mega bytes per second (Mbps) for speed of download and Uploadwhich is equivalent to the speed with which you can remove or place files on the server you are contacting.

For example, the time it takes to load a web page (download) or the time it takes to send a live stream via Skype or upload a video to YouTube (Upload). The higher this value is, the better your Internet performance is.

The tests also give a value in Ms (milliseconds) which they call latency value or ping and which corresponds to the time it takes a set of data to travel from your computer to the server and back. The expression ping results precisely from the expression of Ping pong, effect of the ball coming and going. In this case, it is the data that comes and goes and, the lower this value, the better the performance of your Internet.

Test results can vary greatly. When starting the test, your Internet will do download of a file or several files that will be automatically deleted when the test is over. The calculated result is the average speed at which that file or files traveled to and from your computer.

There can be differences from test to test, and even with the same test at different times of the day, and can be explained by the differences between the operations that each test performs and also by Internet traffic, especially if you are doing the test with Wi-Fi , which may be more subject to variations.

The important thing is to choose one of the tests and check it at different times of the day for a week. Even if there are discrepancies, they should never be too big between the Internet speed you contracted and the one the test shows you. But if after testing the Internet speed you detect that the usual value is almost half of the contracted value, you can and should complain to your operator.