This is seriously fucking cool. Speedtest.net tells you the actual speed of your Internet link. So, for example, my 1500/256kb link with People Telecom (formerly Swiftel) currently delivers 1267/206kb. Not too shabby.
And even better, Crikey is now running the totally unscientific national broadband test — so send your results to boss@crikey.com.au. I’ll be very interesting to see what they discover… stay tuned!
[Update 20 minutes later: Actually, it’s not that cool. There’s a serious methodological flaw. The “compare your results” bit doesn’t take into account one important datum: the rated speed of your Internet link. For example, it shows the “New South Wales average” as 3680kb per second — but that’s over twice the rated speed of the link I have. Without scaling the results as “percentage of rated speed”, the comparisons are meaningless. Still, it’s a pretty site, and useful.]
Crikey posts are subscriber-only, so I’ll post my result here:
That download test is quite realistic. I see ~1MB/s at least once a day: whilst downloading podcasts in the morning. I’m miffed, though, at that 40:1 download:upload ratio. Worse: if I upload at 20KB/s, downloads become so crippled we can’t even check email.
The moment Internode put an ADSL2+ DSLAM in my exchange, I’m switching.