Testing university wireless
Tuesday, June 24, 2008 – 23:59 (UTC)In this very hot day, after having given the Network Security exam this morning, I was surfing on the web in the 3rd building at UNITN with Nicola, when we came up with the idea to measure how much bandwidth we can dispose of through the faculty wireless connection.
So we went to Speedtest.net mith my Macbook Pro and this is the result of some tests between Trento and Rome:
The first thing we noticed is that there is a bandwidth cap for each user, since the download bandwidth is floating between 1Mbps and 2Mbps, and it is the same even if more than one user is downloading at the same time. But the frightening value is the upload one: in some moments we reached about 20Mbps, and it seems that there is no cap to this upload bandwidth.
Since in Italy the best upload bandwidth you can have with a consumer offer is around 512kbps on a DSL line, you can aware of how much me and Nicola were surprised! Usually providers sells DSL connections to consumers, and optical fiber connections only to business entities, and in Italy we end up having broadband download connections choked by narrow upload bandwidth.
Just to give an idea, here’s another test I made from my home DSL connection:
This should be a 7Mbps/384kbps, but since there’s a very high load on the DSLAM, I can reach only 3.7Mbps (in the evening speed decreases till 1Mbps or less)…
Tags: dsl, fiber, italy, optical, trento, unitn, wifi, wireless
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