I have been following a streaming thread on another forum and it has raised some questions I would like to find answers to. I didn’t want to hijack the thread so am posting here.
Since a couple of months I have had RBI wireless. This is a huge improvement over the dial-up I had before and I am generally thrilled with it but now that I am getting used to it I naturally start to wonder just how good it really is and if it can be improved. I understand some things and am learning more every day but a lot of it is frankly over my head.
I ran several speed tests (www.speedtest.net) and they all say my download speeds are between 6-8 Mb/s. This is within the advertised range of 2-10 Mb/s and I have the impression this is fairly good for RBI wireless. I also run Netlimiter on my computer and it agrees with the Speedtest results. However, I notice that in practice Netlimiter (and Opera) always report my speeds, without exception, as much lower. Normal download speed when loading a page from Geekzone or any other site varies between about 0.5 to 1.5 Mb/s. It has never gone over 1.6 Mb/s.
Can anyone explain this discrepancy to me? I assume Netlimiter must be reporting correct speeds since it gave the same results as Speedtest, but why are the speeds so much slower in actual use? What would cause this difference?
Also, Speedtest says it can’t check for packet loss because I either don’t have Java installed or my firewall is blocking the test. As it happens, I installed Java just yesterday to try out Freenet, which did work after the Java installation was completed so I assume Java is working on my machine. I also went into my firewall and allowed outbound access for both ports mentioned in the Speedtest information, but it didn’t make any difference. Is this a Speedtest issue or is something else going on here?
Thanks for the help.