OK, I tried Gabby's test as mentioned above (thanks!) and I ran it 5 times to the server in San Francisco, and then 5 times to the server in Texas. The San Francisco one seemed pretty stable, with an average download speed of 12376 KB, upload of 536 KB, and latency of 28.6. I'm assuming this is good? Then when I did the Texas one, the results were all over the spectrum, from a minimum DL speed of 2500 KB all the way up to 12000 KB.... same with UL and latency. Why is the San Fran one stable, while the Texas one all crazy n stuff?
I don't know, but should you find out the answer to why the internet is the way it is... only share that with me and no one else.. we will publish a book, make a fortune, live a good life sunning on a tropical beach somewhere nice and warm... and sod the world of the internet.. LOL..
Seriously, it can be a whole raft of things causing that condition, which may only be temporary. It maybe due to an overly saturated node, backedup cache, even an engineer working on a section of the service. But that the beauty of the internet, it's like a spiders web that covers the earth, don't be surprised if you find your connection travelling thousands of miles, just to make a connection a 100 miles away, it's very dynamic.
The latency reported, is the time it took for the test server to 'answer the call'.
Again, using these services, are like taking the results of 1,000,000th of the true surfing experience, based on making a single connection at a single point in time, utilising the software I suggested, gives you a greater test across the world, and therefore incresed odds of producing a mean average.
