Find the Fastest ISP
Broadband, shmroadband. Surfing the Web is still sometimes more like wading against the current. Images crawl up the screen, chunks of text appear . . . slllowwwly . . . at your favorite portal. What if Web browsing were much faster? What if the entire page popped up instantly? In this scenario, you'd probably get your browsing done faster, visit more pages, find time for friends and family, even leave your house on occasion.
Faster browsing is certainly possible, but there's a wide gap between theoretical broadband speed—the one your Internet service provider lists on your bill, such as 3 megabits per second (Mbps)—and actual browsing speed, which might be more like 200 kilobits per second (Kbps). Two critical factors cause these dramatic slowdowns while browsing the Web. One is the fact that Web pages are made up of lots of little elements—including the underlying HTML code and text, plus all the images, embedded Flash, and other content—and downloading in this way is just less efficient than grabbing a single object. But another big factor is that, despite claims that often sound alike, not all ISPs are equal: Some simply run faster than others.
The question is, which is the fastest? There's never been a bulletproof, scientific method to test actual surfing throughput. Sites such as BroadbandReports.com, PC Pitstop, and Testmy.net send one large file to and from your PC to test upload and download bandwidth. These can be good tests if you often transfer large files, but they don't do a good job of measuring the browsing experience, which is the dominant Internet activity for most of us.
To find out whether our suspicions about slow browsing speeds are true and to report which ISP provides the best surfing bandwidth, PC Magazine created SurfSpeed (go.pcmag.com/surfspeed), a free utility that tests actual page download speeds for ten of the most popular sites on the Web. From mid-May to mid-June, more than 10,000 readers downloaded the utility from PCMag.com. SurfSpeed uploads performance data to a central database, so users can easily compare their lines' performance to that of others in their area and to their ISP's performance in other areas. (The utility spells out what data is collected.)
Clear Winners (and Losers)
Before we dive into the details, though, we should let you know which ISP scored the highest overall in Web browsing speed and report on some other general findings. See the results chart.
A few ISPs are beginning to roll out fiber-to-the-premises services, promising much faster speeds than cable or DSL. Fiber optics transmit data using hair-thin glass tubes. Verizon's FiOS (which stands for Fiber Optic Services) is by far the largest fiber-based broadband service, but it's available only in select areas of 16 states. Still, we had more than 200 SurfSpeed users who report that they're already using fiber. At an average of 271 kilobits per second, fiber was 35 percent faster than cable and more than 60 percent faster than DSL. (By default, SurfSpeed reports results in kilobytes, which is equal to 8 kilobits, but the industry standard is to report in kilobits.)
Verizon was the only fiber service with sufficient responses for us to analyze its results, which, at 293 Kbps, were even faster than the average fiber number. If you can get FiOS, you'd be crazy not to go for it. Verizon currently charges $44.95 a month for an advertised 15 Mbps download rate—about the same as you're probably paying for cable and perhaps slightly more than DSL. Quadruple that price to jump up to a 30 Mbps plan.
Even if you can't get fiber to your house, the closer the fiber comes to your residence, the faster your connection is likely to be, because you're connecting to the Internet backbone with fewer hand-offs. The New York/New Jersey/Connecticut area has a heavy concentration of fiber optic lines. Optimum Online, the broadband service from Cablevision, which serves many parts of the tristate region, averaged 235 Kbps on the SurfSpeed test, giving it a 12 percent speed advantage over Cox Cable, the second-place cable-modem finisher, and is 40 Kbps faster than AT&T Yahoo! (formerly SBC Yahoo!), the fastest DSL provider. These speeds have helped
Continued
Faster browsing is certainly possible, but there's a wide gap between theoretical broadband speed—the one your Internet service provider lists on your bill, such as 3 megabits per second (Mbps)—and actual browsing speed, which might be more like 200 kilobits per second (Kbps). Two critical factors cause these dramatic slowdowns while browsing the Web. One is the fact that Web pages are made up of lots of little elements—including the underlying HTML code and text, plus all the images, embedded Flash, and other content—and downloading in this way is just less efficient than grabbing a single object. But another big factor is that, despite claims that often sound alike, not all ISPs are equal: Some simply run faster than others.
The question is, which is the fastest? There's never been a bulletproof, scientific method to test actual surfing throughput. Sites such as BroadbandReports.com, PC Pitstop, and Testmy.net send one large file to and from your PC to test upload and download bandwidth. These can be good tests if you often transfer large files, but they don't do a good job of measuring the browsing experience, which is the dominant Internet activity for most of us.
To find out whether our suspicions about slow browsing speeds are true and to report which ISP provides the best surfing bandwidth, PC Magazine created SurfSpeed (go.pcmag.com/surfspeed), a free utility that tests actual page download speeds for ten of the most popular sites on the Web. From mid-May to mid-June, more than 10,000 readers downloaded the utility from PCMag.com. SurfSpeed uploads performance data to a central database, so users can easily compare their lines' performance to that of others in their area and to their ISP's performance in other areas. (The utility spells out what data is collected.)
Clear Winners (and Losers)
Before we dive into the details, though, we should let you know which ISP scored the highest overall in Web browsing speed and report on some other general findings. See the results chart.
A few ISPs are beginning to roll out fiber-to-the-premises services, promising much faster speeds than cable or DSL. Fiber optics transmit data using hair-thin glass tubes. Verizon's FiOS (which stands for Fiber Optic Services) is by far the largest fiber-based broadband service, but it's available only in select areas of 16 states. Still, we had more than 200 SurfSpeed users who report that they're already using fiber. At an average of 271 kilobits per second, fiber was 35 percent faster than cable and more than 60 percent faster than DSL. (By default, SurfSpeed reports results in kilobytes, which is equal to 8 kilobits, but the industry standard is to report in kilobits.)
Verizon was the only fiber service with sufficient responses for us to analyze its results, which, at 293 Kbps, were even faster than the average fiber number. If you can get FiOS, you'd be crazy not to go for it. Verizon currently charges $44.95 a month for an advertised 15 Mbps download rate—about the same as you're probably paying for cable and perhaps slightly more than DSL. Quadruple that price to jump up to a 30 Mbps plan.
Even if you can't get fiber to your house, the closer the fiber comes to your residence, the faster your connection is likely to be, because you're connecting to the Internet backbone with fewer hand-offs. The New York/New Jersey/Connecticut area has a heavy concentration of fiber optic lines. Optimum Online, the broadband service from Cablevision, which serves many parts of the tristate region, averaged 235 Kbps on the SurfSpeed test, giving it a 12 percent speed advantage over Cox Cable, the second-place cable-modem finisher, and is 40 Kbps faster than AT&T Yahoo! (formerly SBC Yahoo!), the fastest DSL provider. These speeds have helped
Continued
posted by AM at
9:09 PM
0 Comments
