What does a speed test measure?

What does the speed test measure

When you are testing your broadband’s functionality, speed is a significant factor because it is connected with reliability. You cannot trust such slow connections to keep you and your family members’ safe online without interruption. However, what makes a good broadband connection? How the things like ping, megabits, and jitter reveal about the complete quality and experience? In this article, we will explain what your internet speed test results really mean.

How is internet speed measured?

1. Upload and download

The initial unit for measuring computer data is called “Bit,” which can be 0 or 1. When talking about the internet speed at which the data transfers across the Internet, megabits per second (1,000,000 bits/second) and now it is gigabits per second (1,000,000,000 bits/second).

The data can be quickly downloaded and uploaded, making your web experience more enjoyable. Because so many things that we love on the Internet – like watching movies, TV and playing music and games. All these things need a lot of information to quickly move through the Internet to our mobile, computer, devices, TV, etc. Hence, if you see more megabits/second are displaying on the speed test results, the more robust your internet connection is.

Do not confuse between megabits (Mb) and megabytes (MB). We use the term “Megabits” to talk about speed data travel, and “Megabytes” is known for the file’s size or storage capacity.

2. Ping

Bing is a primary and useful tool for verifying the connections between two devices on a particular network.

Ping functionality is to send a signal to another system and measures the speed in milliseconds the time it is taking to get a response. In case the other computer is located in distance, or due to a busy network, it may take longer then usual to answer and the ping value will be higher.

Nebula Speed ​​Test Automatically selects the test server closest to you, expecting a lower ping rate. Usually, the ping rate in the same city can be less than 20 meters.

Sometimes, Ping is known as delay, which means a delay at which data is moved from one device to a computer or device. Mostly some online gamers are particularly keen to observe lower delays to ensure a faster, smoother game-play experience.

3. Jitter

In Jitter, the data is spread in a series of pockets across the internet – like the single frames of a celluloid film-strip. Usually, these packets move regularly (e.g. frames/second) and are linked together at the target computer where they started – perhaps a picture, email, a voice or video call.

These days, the devices are smart enough to smooth out the tremor. Therefore, there is no interruption to your devices experience. Alternatively, the networks (because the fiber capacity drops low) become congested with high traffic, making smooth data flow difficult.

Internet services that require data travel in real-time are basically trembling at high rates. You will notice more tremors during internet voice and video calls when the internet stumbles or breaks for a while.