Weird Science - Page 2
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Procedure

My Dad and Mr. Wonderful were talking about the internet and how fast or slow they could download pictures and information from the WEB. We decided to make a timed test of all three.

1. We decided to do all three tests on the same night as close as possible to the same time because we know that the internet can be more or less busy at certain times of the day. All tests were conducted in the evening on Tuesday February 13, 2001 in Reno, Nevada. Mr. Wonderful expected overall network traffic to be busier than normal that night because of the Napster Court Decision earlier that day.

    1. We did our first test on the DSL connection at 7:45pm
    2. We did our next test on the cable modem at 8:27pm
    3. We did our third test on the dial-up connection at 9:05 pm
    4. All 3 pages had static content at time of download
    5. Full download was forced for all sites so the "cache memory" did not affect the time. (Reload + shift) to force download

2. For all tests Mr. Wonderful pulled up the web sites on the laptop. I used the stopwatch to record when download started and finished. My dad recorded the times in the notebook.

3. We had three web sites chosen for all the tests.

    1. The first site was "Sugar Pine", a camera set up to display an ongoing photo of Lake Tahoe.  The URL of this site was .......... http://www.ceres.ca.gov/sierradsp/sugarpine.jpg
    2. The next site was a photo of the quad at the University of Washington. We call this "University".  The URL of this site was ........  http://www.washington.edu/cambots/archive/snow.gif
    3. The third site was a HTML page including several photos and text from the South Pole. We call this site "Antarctica".  The URL of this site was ......   http://www.johnj.com/art/pole/vidpix/fun.html

Later during the week we entered all the information on an Excel Spreadsheet to study the information.

 

Results

Overall the cable modem was faster on all sites in every test. DSL was almost as fast when downloading shorter pages, but could not match the cable on the larger pages. Dial up could not keep up with either of the others.

times.jpg (30999 bytes)    Graph of  average elapsed times to download object.

rates.jpg (35084 bytes)    Graph of average transmission rates during object downloading.

View Detailed Data

       

 

Last Update: December 20, 2001