by Charles Miller

Did you hear the story about the guy who bought a race car to get around faster in San Miguel? If not, it is because this is a story I just made up. This guy was really impatient that it took so long to get from place to place when driving in town, so he reasoned that a Lamborghini Countach with 4.8-liter twin turbocharged V-12 engine developing 803 horsepower and a top speed of 221 MPH was the answer. By his calculations his new car should be able to travel the almost 3 kilometers from Fabrica Aurora to City Market in 27 seconds. To his frustration he was not satisfied with the actual real-world results. A lot of internet users are similarly frustrated when they pay extra for higher-speed internet service only to be disappointed with the actual real-world results.

Once upon a time when at a client’s location in New York City I found the broadband internet connection provided by Spectrum Time Warner was an anemic 3 Mbps (megabits per second) so I called the Internet Service Provider (ISP) to report that there must be a problem. When the technician arrived two days later he corrected an unterminated cable run that was introducing some reflection errors in the wiring. That immediately improved the speed to almost 8 Mbps, but I could not stop myself from politely taunting the technician by asking “What about that 300 Mbps your company claims to deliver?”

The tech sat at the computer for a few seconds to run a quick burst test, the results he proudly showed indicated the download speed was (allegedly) 312 Mbps. Now you do not have to be a network engineer to see there is a huge difference between my 8 Mbps test and his 312 Mbps test results, so which number is correct? The answer: BOTH speeds were correct! There was a difference in the testing methodologies.

I had run a test that takes several minutes and involves downloading a large file from California to New York, probably going through servers in Los Angeles, Denver, Kansas City, Chicago, and/or Cleveland to get to my location in New York City and to measure the actual (not estimated) speed of that connection. The repairman had used a short burst test that produces an estimated (not actual) speed to connect to a nearby server. The test he used was probably measuring the speed from where we were in Lower Manhattan to a test server which could have been a few blocks away in Midtown Manhattan. That estimated speed test of 312 Mbps could actually be accurate if you connected to a web site within the Spectrum Time Warner network and was located nearby to New York City. In the real world, the site you might want to connect to is probably somewhere else such as California, in which case my speed test of 8 Mbps is much more likely to be accurate.

Another very important consideration is that just because you pay extra for 300 or 600 Mbps internet speeds at your house, that does not mean that the web sites to which you connect will permit you to use that much speed on their web site. Web hosts pay thousands of dollars for extremely high-speed, high-capacity connections of much greater capacity than you have at home. They have to do that in order to accommodate possibly hundreds or thousands of visitors connecting at the same time. In order for all visitors to be able to connect simultaneously, web sites can and do throttle the speed at which individual visitors are allowed to connect. So you end up paying your internet provider for 600 Mbps on your end while the web site you connect to might allow you to use only 2-3 Mbps of that speed at their end.

There are indeed special use cases where paying extra for higher-speed internet connections can be justified and could be required. But just like the guy with the Lamborghini, most customers who pay extra for higher internet connection speeds are wasting their money by paying for something they almost never get to use.

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Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant with decades of IT experience and a Texan with a lifetime love for Mexico. The opinions expressed are his own. He may be contacted at 415-101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.

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