How Fast is My Internet Connection, Actually?

A series of tubes.

When diagnosing the speed of my internet connection, I'd been using online speed tests such as speedtest.net to determine what sort of bandwidth I was getting.  I lamented, however, that these were single data points and as such were not sufficient to say one way or the other whether or not my ISP was actually network-neutral or whether I was getting this speed at all times.  Further, since cable internet is a shared line, I'd like to know what the fluctuation in bandwidth over a day looks like.

I found the open-source suite NeuBot, which uses a distributed network of speed test servers as well as BitTorrent peers to periodically test my connection speed and determine what my bandwidth is over time, which is certainly a much better measure than the single data points offered by most simple online bandwidth tests.

First, some details about my setup:

• I have the Comcast/Xfinity Blast plan, which offers 20Mbps down and 4Mbps up, and actually a bit faster considering the "PowerBoost" feature which provides 20% more speed for the first 20MB of a file down, and 10MB up.
• I am using an Arris TouchStone WBM760A and a Linksys WRT54GL router.
• When testing the wireless connection, I put my desktop wireless antenna next to the router.
• I did not in any way control for what else I may have been doing on the network at the time.

Since my router claims to support speeds up to 54Mbps, let me now compare my connection speeds while on wireless to those on the wired connection.  I copy and pasted the data out of Neubot, and ran the following lines of R:

data <- read.table("~/Desktop/speedtest-wired.dat")

hist(data[,10], freq=FALSE, main="Frequency of Observed Download Speeds (Wired)", xlab="Speed (Mbps)", ylab = "Frequency")
hist(data[,12], freq=FALSE, main="Frequency of Observed Upload Speeds (Wired)", xlab="Speed (Mbps)", ylab = "Frequency")

Figure 1:  Upload and Download speeds on Wired and Wireless connection with the Linksys WRT54GL.

Intriguingly, my "54 Mbps" Linksys router is not able to provide nearly the promised download speed on the wireless.  On wireless, it provided an average of 9Mbps down and reasonable performance up, whereas on the wired connection my connection speeds were just as promised down, and perhaps a bit slow at about 3.5 Mbps up.  Since the download speeds on the wireless look Gaussian, I am led to believe that this is due to interference from local sources such as other wireless networks.

Now let's see if I can detect throttling of BitTorrent.  Neubot tests both BitTorrent as well as a conventional speed test, and so if the connection is net-neutral, I expect to see very similar speeds both down and up.

Figure 2:  Upload and Download speeds for normal speed tests versus BitTorrent upload and download speeds.  

While the upload and download speeds for BitTorrent appeared quite a bit more noisy than those for the normal speed test, the results are quite similar with the most noticeable difference being the long tail of slower upload speeds for BitTorrent.  It would require data from considerably more computers to make a case for this being throttling of BitTorrent connections, and so I have contributed my data to the collection being amassed by the NeuBot project.  

Now let's look at how my connection speed varies throughout the day.  Since cable internet connections are on a shared line, I should see my connection speed reduced during peak times of use.  I used the following R to generate these plots:

require(gplots)
require(foreach)

errbars <- function(x, y) {
  mygroups <- unique(x)

  groups <- foreach(i = 1:length(mygroups)) %do% {return(y[x==x[i]])}
  
  yavg <- unlist(lapply(groups, mean))
  ystdv <- unlist(lapply(groups, sd))

  return(list(x=mygroups, lo=yavg-ystdv, yavg=yavg, hi=yavg+ystdv))
}

bars <- errbars(as.numeric(regmatches(as.character(data[,2]), regexpr("[[:digit:]]+", as.character(data[,2])))), data[,10])
plotCI(bars$x, bars$yavg, ui=bars$hi, li=bars$lo, xlab="Hour of Day", ylab="Observed Download Speed (Mbps)")


Figure 3:  Variation in wired connection speeds throughout the day.  Error bars are one standard deviation. 

Connection speeds appeared to be remarkably stable throughout the day, and clearly more data would be necessary in order to see any significant difference between the speeds at various times.  This data was collected over two weeks, and there were about 20 data points per hour.  Suffice it to say that if there is variation in my connection speed throughout the day, it is not very large, no more than 2Mbps down and perhaps 250Kbps up.

This exercise tested my internet connection speed systematically, and I found nothing lacking in Comcast/Xfinity's service.  In particular, I learned the following about my connection:

• Despite the label saying that my Linksys WRT54GL router supports 54Mbps connection speeds, it is unable to deliver even 20Mbps over wireless.  The Gaussian connection speed profile in figure 1 leads me to believe that there is some interference confusing it.  
• The median connection speeds for the normal speed test and BitTorrent test are both nearly the same as my advertised connection speed, indicating that Comcast/Xfinity is not throttling BitTorrent in any noticeable fashion.
• My internet connection speed did not change significantly throughout the day, which is surprising given that I am on a line shared with everyone in my building and perhaps some neighboring buildings.  Perhaps this accusation which is leveled at cable internet providers by fiber and DSL providers is unfair.

I encourage you to install NeuBot yourself and put your own ISP to the test!

Thanks to L D Christoph for allowing me to use her connection as a control group.