I know it’s tempting. You’re trying to be productive at work, and whatever task is at hand just isn’t moving along as quickly as you think it should. Something doesn’t seem right, so you hop on your favorite speed test site and marvel at the horror of what you perceive to be ridiculously slow speeds. A screenshot of those results shortly finds it’s way into the inbox of your IT helpdesk. This might seem helpful, but I’ll go out on a limb and say your IT folks don’t see it that way…and they have their reasons.
You may not know what a speed test is actually testing
There’s one major aspect of a speed test that most folks are completely in the dark about..you’re not necessarily testing the full capacity of your internet bandwidth. You’re only testing the capacity of the bandwidth that’s not currently in use. Let’s say your office has a 50Mb by 50Mb circuit (that’s 50Mb/s download and 50Mb/s upload). You run a speed test and the result comes back with a measly 15Mb download. That doesn’t mean something’s broken and you’re getting cheated out of your rightful bandwidth. It just means that at the time of the speed test, the other 35Mb of download bandwidth was being used for other things. Yes it’s possible something could be wrong, but that’s highly unlikely, and if it is, it will take more than just a speed test to make that determination.
More bandwidth doesn’t always mean things get faster
If a little is good, more must be better..while true with some things, that sentiment doesn’t always apply to bandwidth. While more bandwidth isn’t likely to affect your work experience negatively (aside from the cost associated with it), there is a point in which more bandwidth may not help you either. When we speak of interactions with bandwidth, remember that the service you’re trying to use (website, file sharing site, etc..) also has bandwidth limitations. Many sites/services are going to limit the bandwidth that can be consumed by an individual in order to adequately service huge numbers of users. While it’s common for consumer grade internet connections to come with 200 or 300Mb/s of download bandwidth these days, I’d say most folks never come close to actually using it. And if you do, it’s probably due to a lot of HD video streaming….something your employer likely doesn’t want you doing on the job.
Enterprise internet connections can cost much more than the service you get at home
The type of internet circuits in offices, can sometimes be drastically more expensive per Mb/s of bandwidth than those that you have at home. This is often because they are highly reliable, dedicated fiber optic circuits. These kinds of circuits provide dedicated bandwidth that is guaranteed at a certain rate unlike many consumer grade circuits. They also often come along with other services that you may not know about that increase that bandwidth cost. This may include hosted intrusion prevention/detection, web filtering, hosted phone systems, private MPLS network interconnections between other locations, the list goes on. If you can’t understand why you have 300Mb/s download bandwidth at home, and much less at your office, it’s probably due to this cost and service difference.
Running all of those speed tests may be making things worse!
A speed test works by selecting an endpoint (aka a server), and sending you huge amounts of random data to test your download, then receiving huge amounts of random data from you to test your upload. By it’s very nature, the speed test is using ALL of your available bandwidth. It monitors the rate in which it’s able to send/receive data and voila, that’s your “speed”.
Fortunately a speed test doesn’t generally take very long to complete, but if you’re running them over and over again, it will likely become very noticeable to anyone else on the network. You might start running speed tests thinking there’s an issue, and along the way, create an issue much larger than the original one.
A different approach to reporting issues
There is a better and more helpful way to reporting a problem that you’re having, even if you think it does have something to do with your connection speeds. Instead of sending speed test results, send a thoughtful and detailed explanation of what’s going on. Specifically what are you doing that’s problematic. Give examples of the applications you’re using or websites that you’re visiting. Let them know when you started noticing the problem, and if it happens at certain times of the day (be as specific as possible). And always be kind, and understanding, and they’ll likely be the same with you.
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