There are several web sites that will measure the speed of your Internet service. They will all come up with about the same speed. They will measure both your upload and download speeds.

Generally, your download speed will be much faster than your upload speed and this is mainly because must people are not normally uploading many items and also that what you want to see quickly usually is stuff from other sites which means you are downloading from there.

At my apartment in LaFayette Georgia I typically have upload speeds of 1-20 mbps (meg or megabits per second) and download speeds close to 80 mbps (meg). At GNTC Catoosa County campus recently we were surprised to discover we had upload and download speeds of about 800 mbps (meg but that also makes since as several providers provide 1 gig (gbps or gigabits per second or 1000 times mbps) or 10 gigs in Chattanooga which is why Chattanooga advertises as a gig city.

The site I usually use to test Internet service speeds is www.speedtest.net It is simple to use. When you go to the site click the big GO circle and it will run the test. By USA government definition if your download speed is larger than 25 mbps (meg) you have broadband service.

Another one I like is www.speakeasy.net/speedtest The difference on this one is you can see your speed of connection to different cities. Connecting to Europe will often be slower as the distance and the connections across the Atlantic slow it down. This can be interesting seeing the speeds to other places. Also, if you are buying space on the cloud at AWS (Amazon Web Services) this can be helpful as AWS lets you but service at different data centers for different process. Checking your Internet service speed will vary by day and time of day; however, you should get close to what your ISP charges you for or faster.