Strategy, Innovation, Leadership and Security
Ookla, everyone's favourite speed test service has just published internet performance metrics for North American airports. Calgary Airport has been rated as the best performer of all Canadian airports and is the third best in North America.
Montreal's Pierre Elliot Trudeau Airport was rated the worst. Toronto's expensive Toronto Pearson International Airport is rated 23rd.
There are dozens of sites and services that promise to test your internet speed. The most popular are:
Now you can also add Google to the list.
1 - Go to the Google Search Page (on a PC or Android device)
2 - Enter Speed Test
3 - Choose the Run Speed Test option and ignore the search results
4 - Wait until Google delivers your speed test results
Android Smartphones - This tool also works on Android devices. Just search for Speed Test on the Google search bar on your launcher and it will perform the same test and return results with a similar look & feel.
Some public WIFI hotspots seem to block it while allowing other services to run. Not sure why.
I tried the search on the Google Canada French site using both "Speed Test" and "test de vitesse" and I was not given the speed test web applet. Looks like this may be reserved for english language searches only for now.
Nothing special or different here but this could be one more feature in your cap. I do like the fact that Google interprets the results and explains (in plain English) what kind of video streaming performance you should be able to expect from your connection.
I havent been RIM's biggest Playbook fan and even with their 2.0 OS upgrade, it feels unfinished and rough to use. I wanted to see how the Playbook would perform compared to a Windows 7 laptop when using WIFI sharing of my iPhone's 3G connection.
I closed all the apps on my iPhone 4s, did a force shutdown and restard. I placed my phone 4 inches away from my Wilson cell phone booster and it had a full 5 bars.
I then started the Personal Hotspot function on the iPhone and connected only the Playbook. I ran the Speedtest.net test twice and received similar results.
I then turned WIFI on the Playbook off, placed the laptop in the same location and performed the same test
Notice that both tests where conducted using the same test server.
when I performed the test via the Speedtest.net iphone app, the results were very close to those from the laptop.
This is far from a scientific test but it confirmed my "feeling" that the Playbook was slower than the iphone or laptop when using 3G WIFI Sharing.