Few Days back I was working with a customer who subscribed 1Gbps Home Internet connection. He called us to investigate the network devices and make sure that 1 Gbps is available over the LAN.

I Visited the customer with my 4 years old Dell laptop which has a Lan port of 1G speed. Even though my Lan port was 1 G, I was not able to see a speed of more than 400 Mbps. So I opened a ticket with Service provider.They came with their laptop and did the test. The strange thing , from their laptop they where getting the speed of 950 Mbps.

Later I realised its not the network or service provide problem, its the devices and applications which I used for testing . I learned few things from this deployment and I like to share it with you. So next time when you meet a customer who complains about speed remember the below points.

Speedtest Tool.

When some one complains about speed problems, The very first step we all does is Speedtest. Do you know that, speed test conducted on Speedtest application and web page shows different result.(Note:- You will notice the difference only with higher bandwidth and not with 100-200 mbps)

To get the an accurate speed, run the test using Speedtest APP and not through the web.

1G Network Card

Even if your network card is 1G, you won’t get a speed of 1 G if its drivers are not updated. Latest drivers for My Dell Latitude 5490 Network card was dated 2019. Even with latest available drivers I was not getting a speed of 1 G. Then I brought an year old laptop with latest drives installed and I got a speed of 900 Mbps on this new machine.

So make sure you have the latest laptops with the latest drivers installed.