Internet Speed Test: The Fastest ISPs in the U.S. 2010

We put Internet browsing speeds to the test to see which providers are the best at delivering the Web to you.

Is your Web browsing as fast as it could be? Fifteen years after Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer to compete with Netscape Navigator, there are still browser wars going on, as Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, Apple, and others compete to create the software that loads Web pages the fastest. But the number one factor in page load speed (or any kind of download) isn't your browser. It's your Internet service provider (ISP). After all, a Web page can't finish loading until all the bits arrive.

Interestingly, while cable and phone companies compete to provide fast connections, 80 percent of Americans have no idea how fast their connection is supposed to be, according to a recent FCC study. Still, nearly three quarters of the respondents (71 percent) said that they felt their connection speed is as fast as their ISP promises most, if not all, of the time.

The reality is that no one is experiencing speeds anywhere near to what their ISP claims to offer, at least not when it comes to Web surfing. This isn't entirely the ISP's fault. The ISP's claimed throughput rates are for sustained downloads of an individual file. Web pages are typically made up of several files: the HTML code, graphics, Flash elements, and so forth. For each file, there's latency, essentially the time it takes from when your computer requests the element and when the Web site's server starts sending it to you. And then there are all the vagaries of the Internet as data from the Web site hops from router to router down to your computer. This is why, when ISPs advertise download speeds, they're only referring to downloads directly from their own servers.

There are several good bandwidth testers on the market to test connection speed, including Speedtest.net and Broadband.gov's new Consumer Broadband Test. But these tools typically test downloads of a single, very large file and provide a result that isn't very applicable to Web browsing. So to answer the question, "Is your Web browsing as fast as it could be?" PCMag created SurfSpeed, a free Web surfing speedometer. On a scheduled basis or on demand, SurfSpeed downloads Web pages from 10 popular Web sites, including Google, Apple, eBay, and Yahoo.

Are you ready for some football?

June 27th, 2010 · 20 comments

No, not the World Cup — we’re talkin’ good ol’ American college football. After all, as the homepage of the The Huntsville (Alabama) Times will tell you, kickoff is only a short 68 days away!

If you live in a town like Huntsville, Alabama, it’s beyond the scope of most folks’ imaginations that one simply wouldn’t care about something as earth-shatteringly important as football. As our submitter, a reporter at The Huntsville Times, explains, “We’re one hell of a football nation here — you either root for the University of Alabama Crimson Tide or Auburn University.”

So, our submitter concludes, “I’m guessing this letter comes from an Auburn fan.”

The Mysterious Real-Life Jason Bourne

By Alex in Crime & Law on Jun 27, 2010 at 1:09 pm

It all started with a smell of chemical fumes coming out of a luxury apartment in Los Angeles. When the police showed up, they found machine guns, counterfeiting equipment and $15,000 in high quality counterfeit Benjamins. The suspect bolted out the window, jumping across a series of balconies.

The hunt for a fugitive likened to Jason-Bourne ended up six months later with an equally mysterious question of "Who is Brian Alexik?"

The door was barricaded. A cache of loaded weapons, including an AK-47, sat next to a mosaic depicting the CIA seal. They found equipment for counterfeiting money. High-powered binoculars were trained on the U.S. Federal Reserve building next door.

What followed was a six-week hunt for a suspect who had slipped out of the fire escape moments earlier and whose evasiveness drew comparisons to fictional agent Jason Bourne.

Police would eventually find their man, Brian Alexik, hiding out in his girlfriend’s apartment less than a mile from where he fled. But three weeks on, detectives are still trying to figure out just who he is, what plot they may have thwarted and whether he was a lone wolf or part of a larger group.

It didn’t end, however, like in the movies:

"He got caught," Detective Dan Logan said. "When I interviewed him, he didn’t knock me out, take my gun and take my recorder like in the movies. He’s not as smart or resourceful as the Jason Bourne character."

Link (Photo: LA Police Department)

The crack in the world that will split Africa in two

Geologists working in Ethiopia have found that a 60-meter-long canyon is steadily expanding and will allow a new ocean to form — one which will bisect the African continent.

The shifting of molten rock beneath the Earth's surface initially caused the rift in the remote Afar region of Ethiopia and, as those underground eruptions are continuing, the rift will continue to widen — and, in about 10 million years, create a vastly different Africa.

Dr. James Hammond, a seismologist from the University of Bristol, says that parts of the region are below sea level and the Indian Ocean is only cut off by about a 20-meter strip of land in Eritrea:

"Eventually this will drift apart.... The sea will flood in and will start to create this new ocean. It will pull apart, sink down deeper and deeper and eventually... parts of southern Ethiopia, Somalia will drift off, create a new island, and we'll have a smaller Africa and a very big island that floats out into the Indian Ocean."

(Via BBC News)

Send an email to Marc Bernardin, the author of this post, at marc@io9.com.