CNET: Which internet speed test should you use to test your connection at home?. “Fortunately, there’s an easy way to keep an eye on your home’s internet speeds and that’s with an internet speed test. You’ve got lots of free options online to choose from and might even be able to run one from the same app that you used to set up your router. In most cases, running a test is as easy as pressing ‘Go.’”
Arizona State University: Breakdown on the information highway. “Since March, millions of people have worked from home. Now that it’s fall, millions of children are learning from home. Many of them are learning that their internet service is not what’s depicted in the ads, where smiling people stream, use Zoom, shop, and surf. Instead, their lot has been to gaze, at first in fury and now with resignation, at the spinning wheel of death. Constant internet outages have obviously been exacerbated by a situation no one saw coming, namely millions migrating to working at home due to the pandemic.”
Ubergizmo: Australians Researchers Achieve The World’s Fastest Internet Speeds At 44.2 Terabits Per Second. “Internet speeds around the world vary from country to country, and provider to provider. However, over in Australia, researchers from Monash, Swinburne, and RMIT universities have managed to achieve the world’s fastest internet speeds where they managed to clock it at a whopping 44.2Tbps (terabits per second).”
TechCrunch: Google Chrome to identify and label slow websites. “Is it the web page that’s slow or is it your network connection? In the future, Google’s Chrome web browser may have an answer for you. Google announced today a plan to identify and label websites that typically load slowly by way of clear badging. The company says it may later choose to identify sites that are likely to be slow based on the user’s device and current network conditions, as well.”
Make Tech Easier: 6 Useful Website Speed Test Tools to Find out How Fast Your Site Loads. “You can check the speed of your site using Website Speed Test Tools. These tools analyze items such as testing Time to First Byte or the time it takes for a browser to start receiving information. They also check total load times, page sizes, and the number of requests. These tools identify scripts, fonts, and plugins that cause load time issues (HTML, JavaScript, CSS) and large images that create bottlenecks.”
Ubergizmo: Mozilla’s Firefox Preview Browser Is Twice As Fast. “For those who prioritize speed over other features, you might be interested to learn that Mozilla has recently announced a new mobile browser called Firefox Preview. This will be a stripped down version of its Firefox browser in which the emphasis is placed on privacy and speed.”
Lifehacker: Why Do Internet Speed Tests Report Different Results . “You don’t want to rely on the results of one test from one service, even if they appear great. You should run multiple tests from multiple providers to see if you can get a sense of the trend. Are you speeds, on average, 75 percent slower than what you’re paying for? There’s a problem.”
Quartz: The world’s fastest (and slowest) internet speeds . “The internet is getting faster. Ookla, an internet analytics company, released its state of the internet report this week showing mobile and broadband internet are accelerating around the world, although not every country is keeping pace.”
Digital Trends: The best internet speed tests. “Internet service providers like to make a lot of claims about upload and download speeds when you sign up, but do you ever wonder how those numbers compare to the speeds you’re actually getting on a day-to-day basis? These are the best internet speed tests to help you determine your upload and download speeds, as well as identify other issues with your network, such as packet loss, latency issues, or physical connection problems.”
EurekAlert: Russian scientists have increased the Internet speed up to one and a half times . “A joint article of the scientists of the Samara University and the University of Missouri (Columbia, USA) was published in the IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management journal. The publication presents an algorithm that provides a fast and reliable access to powerful data processing centers (Big Data) for solving high-tech tasks.”
Digital Trends: Think Your ISP Is Cheating You? The Best Internet Speed Tests Help You Find Out. “Internet service providers like to make a lot of claims about upload and download speeds when you sign up, but do you ever wonder how those numbers compare to the speeds you’re actually getting once your connection is set up? These alternative browser-based speed tests will help you determine your upload and download speeds, as well as identify other issues with your network, such as packet loss, latency issues, or physical connection problems. Here are several of our favorite internet speed tests, each of which is dependent on the kind of data and interface you’re looking for.”
University at Buffalo: The end of sneakernet?. “For researchers and companies sharing extremely large datasets, such as genome maps or satellite imagery, it can be quicker to send documents by truck or airplane. The slowdown leads to everything from lost productivity to the inability to quickly warn people of natural disasters. The University at Buffalo has received a $584,469 National Science Foundation grant to address this problem.”
Quartz: How do we make the internet faster? Let algorithms bicker over what we send. “The internet has become a visual place—with companies like Snapchat, Facebook, and Google reinventing their services around your phone’s camera. As a result, the need to relay visual information with less data is becoming increasingly important. Artificial intelligence may solve that problem.”
Google News now has a “lite” mode. “In the full (normal) mode of Google News, as seen below, we aggregate headlines, images and related content, making it fast and easy for people to find articles they care about. In the new Lite mode things look a little different — we keep the headlines and trim the rest of the components down to their essentials so that the app loads more quickly (and uses less than one-third of the data). When people read an article in Lite mode, they’ll also benefit from Google’s previously announced faster and lighter mobile web pages. By default Lite mode triggers automatically when a slower network is detected (users can also choose to control Lite mode directly).”
LinkedIn has launched LinkedIn Lite. “Tech companies are increasingly realizing that if they want to make their services more accessible to Indians, they need to adapt to India’s slow internet speeds. After Facebook, Google and Twitter, LinkedIn is the latest to launch a ‘Lite’ version of its service, specifically for India. The light version of LinkedIn’s mobile website, called LinkedIn Lite, is aimed at users with slow internet connections or those on metered internet connections with low download limits.” How about more of this in the US? Not all of us have California-grade Internet speeds.
