What kind of speeds should I be seeing?

What is "fast" to one person may not be "fast" to another.  In order to determine if your Internet connection is as fast as it should be, we measure the download speed in kb per second.  There are various different web sites that test connection speed.  These sites may produce varied results depending on their location, traffic on the Internet at the time of testing, and the type and speed of their server.  A few of these testing sites are www.bandwidthplace.com, www.dlsreports.com or www.speed-test.net. 

The above two site will give you an estimate of the type of speed you are getting, but there is a more accurate method of testing speed through the wireless network.  Following the steps below you can run a file transfer test.

1) Open a command prompt.  (Using a Windows 95/98/ME click Start, click Run, type command and press enter.  Using Windows 2000/XP click Start, click Run, type cmd and press enter.)

2) At the command prompt, type FTP 192.168.254.241 and press enter.

3) You will then be asked for a user name, type anonymous and press enter.

4) When asked for a password, enter your email address.

5) You will then be logged into our FTP server and should see a prompt ftp>.  At that prompt type hash and press enter.

6) Then type the command get 1mb.txt and press enter.  The computer will start to retrieve a 1MB file.

7)  When this completes you will see some statistics.  One of the statistics will display Kbytes/sec.  Take that number and multiply it by 8.  The result will give you kilobits per second (kbps).  Compare the results with the chart below for your specific grade of service.  You may wish to run this test a number of times and see what the average results are.

The wireless network is fed by a DS3 line.  The speed of one DS3 line is 45 megabits per second.  Currently, all bandwidth on the wireless Internet system is regulated in four different classes.  Two for business and two for residential.  Each class of service has a committed information rate (CIR) and a maximum burst rate (MBR).  As long as there is enough bandwidth available on the network, users will be able to browse at the MBR.  As more the bandwidth is used by users, and the network reaches its peak limits, users will be pushed back from the MBR to their CIR.  This might only be noticeable during peak periods of usage.  The CIR and MBR for each class of service is listed in the table below.