If you would like to know the value of your Internet connection, it is a fairly easy calculation. First, you need to find out what speed you are getting. There are several web sites with free speed test applications, among them www.speedtest.org, www.speakeasy.net/speedtest and www.speedtest.org. Any of these sites will run a test for you and show you what download and upload speeds you are actually getting. And some will show you the averages for you location. Then divide your monthly cost by your speed. You’ll get a “dollars per Kbps†or “dollars per Mbps†result. Typically the higher your connection speed is, the higher the value of your Internet connection given the same cost. If, that is, you use all of that speed on a regular basis.
If you are just doing emails and visiting social web sites, the speed of your connection is probably not very relevant to you. If, on the other hand, you download movies, music files and videos on a regular basis, a higher speed connection is definitely one of your concerns. As is your absolute budget amount. You may want a higher connection speed but simply not want to pay a significant extra monthly fee for it. If you have alternative connection methods available to you, such as high speed digital subscriber line (DSL) service over your business phone line, you might want to use the value formula as one of the methods of comparison when choosing your supplier.
It’s kind of fun to run the speed tests. Some of the web sites mentioned above also list optional things – some free, some for a fee – to do things for you like defragmenting your disk, cleaning up your registry, etc. – but when you are simply comparing speeds between one vendor and another it’s not necessary to do anything but run the free speed test and do the value calculation.Â
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