Curiously, while using WiFi at a hotel, my initial (lousy) connection claimed to be at 144 Mbps while my present (much better) speed is only 13 Mbps? Does this make any sense? Was the first value an erroneous value, perhaps?
Bonus: How does connection speed relate to available bandwidth? If the wireless router is being max’d in the evening at the hotel when mostlikely everyone is accessing the internet, shouldn’t my connection speed be a direct indicator of lack of bandwidth, at least in theory?
I’m pretty certain. But, I can check again when the wifi system will probably be busy again after dinner tomorrow. We’ll see what the results are. (Is 144 Mbpc like ridiculously fast???)
Download speeds just upward of 1 Mbps are considered broadband, if just barely. 15 or 20 Mbps is typical for cable based ISPs, and is blazingly fast from the average consumer’s perspective. But even 1 Mbps is fast enough to download AV content in less time than it takes to watch, which also means you can stream AV media live.
144 Mbps? That’s like five times as fast as in Japan, which already has internet speeds thirty times faster than is average in the United States. So where was your hotel located? North Korea?
Windows tells me that my cable (ethernet hookup) at home is 100 Mbps, but I wonder. (It says the wifi is 56 Mbps.) Are these ratings actually true, and are they constant?
Use this. The internet I have costs like $40/month for 15Mbs but I typically clock about 22Mbs. Keep in mind that, as I understand, these speed test sites aren’t always super accurate.
A Wireless-N network goes up to 300Mbps. That is the network, though, not the internet connection.
You could connect to a network and do on-network stuff all day long at 300Mbps. But on a hotel network you’re not looking to do network stuff (talk to other computers on the wireless network) you’re looking to connect to the Internet which is pretty much not related to that 300Mbps (or 144Mbps) number.
The Internet is only coming through whatever sized pipe the hotel has, and then being shared with other people on the network. It can only give you so much, and not 144Mbps.
You could connect to a network at 144Mbps but the Internet pipe only give you .5 or 1Mbps. You could connect to a network at 13Mbps but the Internet pipe is giving you 2 or 3Mbps.
I am not a network engineer or IT professional (but I did stay in an Embassy Suites last night)
I travel a lot for work, and I pay attention to this kind of thing because I’m a nerd. When most people talk about internet speeds, they are talking about raw throughput (bandwidth). Today, an average internet user will start to notice when this speed is less than, say, 1 Mbps. I’ve found that most decent hotels in the US are close to or better than this (but certainly not all of them). However, bandwidth is not the only thing determining how fast your connection is/feels.
There is another factor called latency, which is the time it takes to get a message to another computer and receive a response. Data is relayed across a network in tiny chunks called packets. To get from your laptop to your gmail account server, each one of these packets may have to be relayed by ten computers along the way. My understanding is that once your computer sends a packet, it waits for a receipt confirmation before sending the next one. A normal response time to another computer over the internet is around 100ms, or .1 second. If no response is received within a certain timeframe (perhaps 3 seconds, which is an eternity in this scenario), the packet has timed out and it is resent. This transaction needs to happen thousands of times to send or receive a typical email. A connection with high latency will feel very slow and be intermittently unresponsive as packets time out.
Imagine a line of people relaying sandbags from one place to another. You can appreciate how one lazy bastard can screw the whole thing up. This lazy bastard is your hotel’s wifi router. I find that many hotels haven’t invested enough money often enough to keep up with the ever growing data demands of their typical guest. When available, I always utilize the wired connection; it is typically much more stable and responsive. That said, plenty of hotels have pretty pathetic throughput as well, so you’re kinda much boned no matter how you come at it.
Yes, latency is an issue, but your explanation of the packets isn’t quite accurate. The sending system does not wait for an ack from the previous packet before sending the next. Once the receiving system is expecting them, the sending system will just fire off a whole bunch of packets, each of which has a sequence number. The receiving system (which may get them out-of-order if they didn’t all follow the same path) puts them together, and if anything’s missing, it will request a resend of the missing piece.
Thanks for the clarification, Gary. So then how is it that latency seems to have such a huge impact on something like browsing the web? Does it come down to packet loss?
