Have you ever wondered what the inbound and outbound internet speeds are? Most likely, the majority of users will answer this question in the affirmative, because this is the very first thing that you need to pay attention to when concluding an agreement with a service provider or mobile operator for providing connection services to the World Wide Web. Unfortunately, many have a clear confusion with this, because sometimes there is no clear understanding of the terms and the provider’s units for measuring the connection speed. Let's figure out what's what.
What is the incoming and outgoing speed of the Internet in a general sense?
So, for starters, let's try to determine a common understanding, which should not cause any special questions.
By incoming speed, it is customary to understand the speed of incoming data transfer (the speed of opening pages, the speed of downloading files to your computer or mobile device, etc.). Outgoing means the speed of transferring data from your terminal to another subscriber or server (sending email, including with attachments, sending messages in instant messengers, etc.).
Incoming and outgoing Internet speed: what is it in units of measurement
When considering these two concepts, special attention should immediately be paid to the confusion that arises when determining speed.
The problem here is that the provider or mobile operator, as a rule, indicates the speed of the incoming connection in the contract or in the advertisement of its services. But this indicator is expressed either in megabits per second (Mbps), or in gigabits per second (Gbit / s). Yes, but loading information is usually measured in megabytes! This is where the difficulties begin, because the user sees that he seems to have a fairly fast connection, and the same films are downloaded very slowly (if you take as an example the download via a direct link from some resource, and not using torrents, where the principle of loading is slightly different from the standard one). Why is that? Yes, simply because the speed indicator itself needs to be converted from megabytes to megabytes!
So, you have a connection with a maximum incoming speed of 100 Mbps, which is an average indicator for most fiber-optic connections (leased lines). Since one byte contains eight bits, it is easy to calculate that the declared speed during conversion will be equal to 100 Mbps: 8 = 12.5 Mb / s. So make a conclusion! But it’s not worth it to be upset, because it is believed that for comfortable work on the Internet, the connection speed, if expressed in megabytes, should be in the range of 10-20 Mb / s. This will be enough for more or less fast loading of the required content, unless the file sizes are tens or even hundreds of gigabytes.
How to check the incoming and outgoing connection speeds?
What is the incoming and outgoing speed of the Internet, a little understood. But in this case, we have only the highest possible indicator declared by the company that provides Internet access services. In fact, the real speed is usually much lower than the declared limit.
This can be due to many factors, among which the main ones are usually called the restrictions set on the Internet resources themselves (such as in file-sharing networks like Turbobit or DepositFiles), insufficient provider equipment, the use of anti-virus programs and firewalls that limit traffic, incorrect network connection settings, using remote type proxies or all kinds of VPN clients, etc.
Checking the real speed in both directions in the Windows operating systems themselves without sufficient knowledge is quite problematic, because even using the ping command in the command console does not give a complete picture.
For an ordinary user, it will be easiest to turn to specialized sites on the Internet (for example, 2ip.ru), where a counter is installed that instantly gives real indicators of the connection speed. You can also use the simplest utilities like SpeedTest.
Outgoing Internet speed higher than incoming: what would it mean?
The user measures the speed and sees that the incoming speed of the Internet is less than the outgoing. Immediately, questions begin about why this could happen. It’s worth saying right away that this is absolutely normal. Of course, in theory or, if you want, ideally, both values should, if not coincide, then at least be at approximately the same level. But why is the outgoing speed of the Internet more than the incoming, in practice? Again, this may be due to many reasons, and the situation can be clarified using the simplest example.
Suppose you send a friend a letter with an attachment of a sufficiently large graphic file on one of the Internet mail servers. The letter leaves instantly. Now your friend sends you the exact same message and the exact same attachment on the same server, but your incoming message (and attachment) loads much more slowly. The reason here is that incoming mail itself is checked for viruses, for spam, filtered, etc., and it is because of this that there is a clear slowdown in reception. In addition, the check is also performed at the level of a standard antivirus installed on your computer. But this is only the simplest situation, and the true causes of this phenomenon can be much more.
An example of testing speed when downloading torrents
Now let's look at how to determine the speed indicators, and at the same time find out why the incoming Internet speed is less than the outgoing one, using the example of tracking indicators in the popular program for downloading torrents uTorrent. Surely many people noticed that for the active download two values are displayed.
One indicates the speed of downloading available content to your terminal, the second displays the return. Sometimes, by the way, with speeds you can notice the opposite phenomenon. Here the main reason is the download technology itself.
Content is not downloaded from a single server, but from several user terminals located on the network, on which the searched material is partially or fully downloaded. When you save at least some part of the entire downloaded file (s) to your terminal, distribution begins, that is, you also give content to other users in parts that are saved on your hard drive. This is where the imbalance is observed. It turns out that the more distributing computers, the faster the files are downloaded to your terminal. But when the distributing terminals are one or two, and you have the file loaded almost completely (say, you resumed downloading after a break), it naturally turns out that the outgoing speed is greater than the incoming. That is, you give the content faster than downloading the underloaded components, only because the information on your computer is already almost in its entirety, and there is simply nowhere to download the missing components from.
Can I increase the connection speed?
What is the incoming and outgoing speed of the Internet, more or less clear. Now we turn to important issues that interest all users without exception. It is clear that everyone would like to increase these indicators as much as possible. But here you need to clearly understand that in the case of an incoming connection above the limit set by the provider, you will not jump no matter how hard you try. Another thing is that you can optimize the connection, for example, by changing some settings. For example, it is believed that a significant increase in speed is provided by the use of free DNS servers, whose addresses are specified in the IPv4 protocol settings. You can also use all sorts of optimizer programs that have a similar feature. Sometimes it’s advisable to enable a special turbo mode, as provided in the Opera browser. You can also change your browser altogether! But the easiest solution to speed up page loading is, of course, clearing the browser cache. In the torrent client, you can set download and upload priorities, not to mention the maximum download speed.
Brief Summary
That, in fact, is all about what is the incoming and outgoing speed of the Internet. It seems that everyone already understood the difference. The main problems usually arise with the determination of speed in the units used in each particular case. But even after reading the material there should be no questions.
As for improving the performance of your own PC, it is better to give preference to applications designed for comprehensive care (for example, Advanced SystemCare), which not only know how to perform Internet acceleration, but also clean all computer garbage in the system without user intervention.