CONNECTION SPEED

Occasionally you'll connect to the web and download a page which takes forever to load. Why is the connection so slow?

Network speed depends on all the following

• The speed of your connection to OlympusNet. This depends mostly on the quality of your phone line connection to USWest (or Sprint/United) and on your modem.
• The speed of OlympusNet's connection to its two Internet providers and their connections to the various backbones.
  
• Speed depends on how heavily loaded your destination web server (www.???.com) is. If many people are accessing it, it will probably be sluggish.
• Speed also depends on the connection between the backbone provider and your destination web site www.???.com If you go to http://www.pcpitstop.com/internet/tracert.asp and type in the destination web server, for example, www.netscape.com, you can see how long it takes Internet packets to reach www.netscape.com from one of OlympusNet's Seattle Internet connections. This is measure of how long Internet packets take to travel between your destination web server www.xxx.com and Seattle.

  For example, using www.savvis.net as a destination web site, if you go to http://www.pcpitstop.com/internet/tracert.asp and type in www.savvis.net, you'll see...

  
  traceroute to extranet2.savvis.com (209.144.53.182), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
  
   1  e2-1.c1.sea.savvis.net (204.194.12.1)  1.811 ms  1.529 ms  1.583 ms
  
   2  atm8-0-059.CR-1.StlsMO.savvis.net (209.83.222.85)  74.467 ms  73.254 ms  73.930 ms
  
   3  extranet2.savvis.net (209.144.53.182)  78.678 ms  75.031 ms  81.624 ms
  
  

  This shows that it takes on average, 75.031 ms for packets to travel between Seattle and St. Louis (where www.savvis.com is located) Now to see the other half, from Seattle to OlympusNet, enter www.olympus.net

  
  traceroute to www.olympus.net (198.133.237.12), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
  
   1  e2-1.c1.sea.savvis.net (204.194.12.1)  1.743 ms  3.135 ms  1.491 ms
  
   2  olympus-net.cust.ixa.net (204.194.9.146)  43.905 ms  40.457 ms  21.112 ms
  
   3  www.olympus.net (198.133.237.12)  4.703 ms  4.256 ms  5.722 ms
  
  

  This shows that it takes on average, 4.256 ms for packets to travel between Seattle and OlympusNet
• The best test of all is the ping test which measures the time it takes to go from your computer to the destination computer at www.???.com. To see how to do it visit http://www.pcpitstop.com/internet/pinger.asp