This is a brief post to show you the quickest way to test your home's Wi-Fi and internet speeds. For the purpose of this test, we are NOT going to distinguish between your internet speed at the cable modem, and your home network Wi-Fi internet speed. Technically they may be two very different numbers, but practically speaking, all we really care about is your Wi-Fi download speed at the location in your home where it is most critical.
Step 1: On your smartphone, tablet, or laptop, open your web browser and use Google to search for "speed test" and this is what you will see (Note: this works best on the Chrome browser, and you may not see this using another browser).
If possible, you should run this test standing next to your TV, or wherever you need to have fast download speeds for streaming video or playing online games. This is what the Google Speed Test window looks like:
Step 2: Run the speed test by clicking on the button. The test will run and you will see the speed test meter as it measures your download speed first, and then your upload speed.
Here is one example of download speed:
Step 3: That's it! You will see the speed test report, which will look like this:
Your results: OK, now what? If you are getting DOWNLOAD speeds of 20mb or higher, that's great! You should be good to go for streaming HD video, attending video conference calls like Zoom or WebEx, playing online games, etc. You can re-run this test as many times as you want, and you should run it in different locations in your home, to see where you may have any Wi-Fi dead zones. Note: UPLOAD speeds are not critical unless you are gaming or uploading large files. Most people only need to look at the DOWNLOAD speed. If you get a low speed (10mb or lower), run it again, at least two or three times. If it keeps coming up slow, then you have a problem. In the next post, we will talk about how to analyze that problem to find out what the cause for your slow speed is.
NEXT: Why is my Wi-Fi so Slow?