ISP’s love to throw big numbers at you when you are signing up for DSL/cable modem services. It seems you can $6 per month yourself to death by upgrading your speed to ridiculous levels. Well, be sure you are getting what you pay for by giving your connection a speed test.

By using the Speakeasy Speed Test, you can see exactly what your upload and download speeds are.

If your speeds are not exactly as advertised, there are a few things to remember about download speed in general:

• When your ISP says your download speed is 6 Mbps, this means 6 megabits (not megabytes) per second, so your speed is:

6 megabits * (1 byte / 8 bits) ~= .75 megabytes (750 KB)

• A lot of Internet servers are not capable of “serving” content consistently at the speeds ISP’s provide.