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a few years ago we, here in N. Idaho, got sold out by verizon to frontier. my dsl service is the worst i have had and i was on the net way before it became public. verison was not the fastest i had but they were better than comcast experience i had when i lived in washington (state). i have the basic service for dsl as i use netflix ocasionally. i have been testing my speed here for several days and the best speed i get is in the lower mid 700's which is similar to the testings i have been doing for the past couple of years. what interests me is that isp companies are able to advertize 2k when the actual max is nearly a third of that. that is false advertizing if i have ever seen one. why is it that there are no lawsuits on this? i think it is time to take this to a national level. i know frontier is more common on the east side but their crappy service is not limited to the east! if the government is on their side, perhaps we should be suing them instead! i am so sick of this monopolistic bs... we are all slaves to corporations. the only difference between us and the ancient egyptian slaves is that we are let to beleive we are free. internet speeds are just one little manifestation of the rediculous corporate wellfare state we have here largly thanks to the gop.

I believe the most significant factor why the OOKLA-based tests show a higher reading is because they create a swarm of multiple connections. If the network is at full capacity or there is excessive latency for another reason, the extra connections can push more data through. Usually they together compete 'as equals' with other data streams active at the same time. In this case I got 7 connections to SpeakEasy at Washington DC. The number seems to be variable, and, as far as I can see, I cannot influence it. Of course, if everybody opened more connections to get higher speed, nobody would get it. A somewhat related discussion about network congestion and the FTP protocol. I think a more realistic test is a download of a controllable number of files from a server or servers with known capacity much higher than your line is. That is what you could do in normal use as well. Starting 7 downloads and fragmenting your disk? Probably not. Using special software to spam the network? Probably not the right thing to do. LeaseWeb provides a good, unbiased download speed test with low CPU overhead (unlike Flash tests). I do not know a good public place to upload to. If you have an FTP server, it will work fine, because you can easily start as many files as you decide.