Before doing this I have to explain the limitations of doing such a measurement.

Measuring the speed of an Internet connection is like measuring the speed of the car. You are only measuring it at a particular location at a point in time. If the traffic happens to be heavy at the time when you do the measurement you will get much slower speed than when it is less congested.

A number of web pages provide an ability to measure the speed of your Internet connection between your computer and a server somewhere else in the world. The best way to find these web pages is simply to do a google search on “speed test”.

Some of the speed tests will ask you which server you wish to do the test on, and show where in the world, that server is.

On doing the test you should get three results: the ping speed, the download speed and the upload speed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping_(networking_utility)

This is the time is takes a small amount of computer data to go from a computer to another computer via a computer network and back to the originating computer. The smaller the ping number the faster and therfore better the result. Generally the further the computers are away from one another the longer (bigger number) the ping time.

This is the speed, usually in Megabites per second (Mb/s) for data to be received from a remote computer via a network. The higher the speed the better.

This is the speed, usually in Megabites per second (Mb/s) for data to be sent from a computer to a remote computer via a network. The higher the speed the better.

Most internet communication are asymmetric meaning that the speed at which the data is received is different to the speed at which it is sent. Typically the receive speed is much faster than the send speed. A Symmetric network would send and receive data at the same speed. Generally as most internet users are consumers of information they have little need for fast sending speeds so a asymmetric is quite suitable.

Some Speed test web sites have the ability to compare the speed test you do with tests you have previously done, with others tests and with averages of tests done by ISP, country and world wide.

Like they say in investment consulting, past performances are not an indication of future performance. So just because the average user of a certain ISP may get a certain average speed does not mean that you will. A very small change in physical location can make a big difference in data speeds, especially with mobile wireless.