Results and Reporting

Use the interactive drill down selector to select countries, states, post codes, users and the various broadband plans available in those regions.

If the broadband plan is not displayed in the graph then it may be available in the drop down list. The graphs only display the providers and their plans where there is sufficient data.

Hovering the mouse over bars of many of the charts will provide a preview of the data that is displayed when you click on the bar. Hovering the mouse over points on line charts or bars on bar charts will display a tool tip of the details of that data point.

All charts display data that is at most 1 day old. Charts for individuals represent live data.

Where a chart is blank, it means that there is no data available or data has recently become available but our daily analysis engine has not yet run.

Most of the line charts show a shaded area behind the line. This area represents one standard deviation from the mean. This is a measure of how spread out the data is. Some data is very consistent and will have a low standard deviation. Other data has a high standard deviation. This means that one measurement may differ significantly from the next measurement.

Line Speed

The line speed is the raw speed the internet connection measured in both directions - upload and download speed. The download speed is generally faster than the upload speed.

DNS

Your computer communicates with another computers via their IP Address. When you type a URL (ie www.tcpiq.com) this needs to be translated into an IP address. This is called DNS resolution or a DNS lookup. Your computer does this by asking your ISP's DNS server whether it knows what the IP address is of the URL. If it does then it returns the IP address. If not, it will ask an upstream DNS server.

Depending on how your ISP has configured its DNS servers, this process may take between milliseconds and seconds. Also, the timing may change dramatically based on the hour of the day or the day of the week. An ISP with poorly configured DNS servers may show a slow down on Sunday nights or at about 3:00pm to 4:00pm or 5:30pm to 7:00pm weekdays when school children and parents return home.

ISPs that target the business market may show a slow down between 8:30 am and 5:30 pm. While ISPs that target the consumer market my have a relatively fast DNS lookup time during this period.

Latency

Latency is also known as 'ping time'. Latency is the amount of time packets take to travel between to points on the internet. In the case of the line speed meter, it is the time it takes packets to travel from our web server to your computer.

Latency is generally proportional to the speed of your internet connection but there are a lot of factors that may affect it. If you compare a satellite user to that of a ADSL user, you will notice that a satellite user will have a huge latency.

Latency is very important to online computer gamers and people who want very fast internet connections.

ISPs with poorly configured networks will show an increase in latency during busy periods. Also, if there are any network errors that result in some packets being lost then this too will show high latency.

Licensing

In reviewing the data, please be aware of our licensing.