Charlie L.

All these sites that test your speed are based in some way on command line stuff. SO... lets see if they match up. I have AT&T and they always tell me to use Speedtest.net and "See your ping is fine." Theese same techs DO NOT KNOW WHAT THEY ARE LOOKING AT WHEN I SHOW THEM MY TRAPS!

Speedtest.net reported this.
http://www.speedtest.net/result/*******646.png

28ms ping - This is how long it takes 1 packet of information to go fro my computer to that server. 1000ms is 1 second.
17.46 Mb/s Down - This is better than promised. See below.
1.47 Mb/s Up - As promised. See Below.

Depends on the document. A small Word document should only take a 2 or 3 KB, a music track takes about 3Mb and a picture takes less than 1MB on average. Notice the large B... Mb is mega bits, MB is mega bytes. 8 bits to a byte. Do the math.

If you are on a windows machine Click Start then run or in the search box type cmd or cmd. Exe and you will get a DOS screen(If you are a LINUX or other OS user... you know all this and I don't know mac at all.). It's a black screen with white letters. Now you can type ping speedtest.net or Iike to add a few flags to it. -t means it will continue to run and -l allows you to set the paket size. So I type ping speedtest.net -t -l 1000. Below are my results. P.s. To stop this CTRL+C.

C:\Documents and Settings\Owner>cd.

C:\Documents and Settings>cd.

C :\> ping speedtest.net -t -l 1000

Pinging speedtest.net [74.209.160.12] with 1000 bytes of data:

Reply from 74.209.160.12: bytes=1000 time=4240ms TTL=49
Reply from 74.209.160.12: bytes=1000 time=50ms TTL=49
Reply from 74.209.160.12: bytes=1000 time=51ms TTL=49
Reply from 74.209.160.12: bytes=1000 time=50ms TTL=49
Reply from 74.209.160.12: bytes=1000 time=4236ms TTL=49
Reply from 74.209.160.12: bytes=1000 time=50ms TTL=49
Reply from 74.209.160.12: bytes=1000 time=4239ms TTL=49
Reply from 74.209.160.12: bytes=1000 time=51ms TTL=49
Reply from 74.209.160.12: bytes=1000 time=50ms TTL=49
Reply from 74.209.160.12: bytes=1000 time=50ms TTL=49
Reply from 74.209.160.12: bytes=1000 time=50ms TTL=49
Reply from 74.209.160.12: bytes=1000 time=51ms TTL=49

Ping statistics for 74.209.160.12:
Packets: Sent = 12, Received = 12, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 50ms, Maximum = 4240ms, Average = 1097ms
Control-C^C
C :\>

As you can see 28ms is BULL... here 50ms is the minimum and 4240 is the longest tis test took. THATS OVER 4 SECONDS! Now granted I'm having issues with my line that it's taken them MONTHS to even admit there is a problem, but this I think definitively answers your questions.

Trace Routes are VERY helpful too. Learn your DOS commands. Just google it...