Speed differs greatly between test - please explain 1

[limeman]

My setup - Athlon 1.5 sys with Surfboard 4200 modem, telemedia cable service.

This is my issue - I felt my connection was extremely slow, so I called my modem manufacturer to see if there was somehting he could do, he said to enter the command prompt and ping yahoo (66.218.71.113), he stated that with my service, I should get an average of under 200ms, maybe even under 100ms. The avg consistanly comes back around 415ms. I run this several times a day, throughout the day. I've even seen 500 and 600ms. Then he said to run tracert to the same address and the second line he said was to the telemedia server (550ms). (I've tried pinging other servers with the same results)

My cable company says that this is not an accurate test, but to go to

http://www.toast.net

and run the speed test. They flucuate between 50k and 550k. Mostly in the 400 and 500's. They said that was very good and accurate of the speed and location of the different servers. Why are the pings constantly so slow and these toast test good? I feel that the connection is slower than it should be.

 

[jimbopalmer]

I am going to ramble on here, stop me if you don't want to know this stuff.

Does browsing 66.218.71.113 happen any faster than browsing yahoo.com?

This could indicate a DNS issue, if you look up your current DNS server perhaps it is slow, how many hops to it in a traceroute? does it ping at all? (you did not mention an OS, try winipcfg or ipconfig /all to check your DNS server)

A down load measures bandwidth, a ping measures latency. the two tests are not of the same feature

http://www.stuartcheshire.org/rants/Latency.html

despite having DSL in the name, this tweak test will tune for cable systems

http://www.dslreports.com/tweaks

you could email me a traceroute from your system, perhaps with the results of the ipconfig /all my email address in in my bio (click on my Name) I tried to remain child-like, all I acheived was childish.

 

[limeman]

Thank you, I'll contact you with that info, via email.