Are You Getting What You’re Paying For? 25 Online Tools to Test Your Internet Service
By Jessica Merritt
Most people pay a hefty amount of money every month to ensure that they have a quality connection to the Internet. But are you really getting what you pay for? Your speed, quality of service, and even the sites you’re allowed to use may be interfered with. Put these tools to work to make sure you’re getting everything you’ve been promised.
Performance and Speed
Check your Internet connection to see if you’re meeting the speeds you’re paying for.
- CNET Bandwidth Meter Speed Test: This speed test will check your bandwidth against DSL, cable modem, and broadband services.
- Intel Broadband Speed Test: Check out this test to compare your speed with what others have.
- Doctor Ping: Compare your ping time to more than 100 servers with averages from other users with Doctor Ping.
- Roadrunner Speed Test: Check your Roadrunner connection to see if you’re really getting the speed you’ve been quoted.
- AT&T Speed Test: Just like the Roadrunner speed test, this tool will analyze the movement of your AT&T data.
- Audit My PC’s Broadband Speed Test: This test offers broadband speed testing results that are both accurate and easy to understand.
- Internet Performance and Speed Test: Use this test to check out your Internet connection speed.
- Speakeasy Speed Test: Accurately measure your line and internet connection speed with Speakeasy’s test.
Uptime
Does your ISP promise 100% uptime? Check their record with these tools.
- IsItUp: Monitor your ISP’s uptime from an external system using this service.
- 24×7 Line Monitoring: Check to see if your ISP is delivering on their always-on service.
Integrity & Quality
Check for interference on your line with these tools.
- Web Integrity Checker: The University of Washington and the International Computer Science Institute have teamed up on this tool that will detect whether or not your ISP is inserting advertisements into pages.
- Line Quality Testing: Check for packet loss on your line, plus problem routers along the way.
- Network Diagnostic Tester: Run performance tests on your network connection using this tool.
- Smokeping: Monitor your IP address for 24 hours or more to detect packet loss or excessive latency variability from three different locations with Smokeping.
- PingPlotter: With PingPlotter, you can collect data to uncover performance and security issues on your line.
- Network Neutrality Check: Take this test to see if your ISP is altering your traffic in any way.
- Pcapdiff: This tool will compare two packet captures to indentify packets that have been forged, dropped, or mangled.
- Wireshark: Use Wireshark to capture raw packets and determine whether or not you’re a victim of ISP packet spoofing.
Ports
Make sure you’re getting full access to the ports you need by using these tools.
- Open Port Check Tool: This tool will tell you if your ISP is blocking certain ports or not.
- Open Port Tool: DynDNS offers this tool that will determine if you have incoming ports blocked by your ISP.
Throttling
Is your ISP throttling your bandwidth? These tools will help you find out.
- Glasnost: Use this test to determine whether or not your ISP is throttling BitTorrent traffic.
- Gemini Project: Use this project and team up with someone else who uses your ISP to find out if you’re being throttled.
- Vuze Network Status Monitor: Check for throttling right in your Vuze client, and help gather data on traffic control at the same time.
- Network Measurement Agent: This tool will look for and flag a number of different ways your ISP may throttle your data.
Simple
Get to the bottom of what your ISP offers by using this simple tool.
- Your TOS: A tool that’s worth checking out is your ISP’s terms of service. They will often spell out that they’ll stop your traffic if deemed necessary.
Are You Getting What You’re Paying For? 25 Online Tools to Test Your Internet Service
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