Tim_Lookingbill

Searching for car keys in trash.

No, Phil. I am not talking about ISP bandwidth speed in mbps. I'm talking about overall downloading of web pages timed in seconds. It got severely slow (time it takes to fully download web and email pages) for 6 months and then it returned to normal. I thought the slowness was the new normal. IMO there is no normal on the internet it seems due to the sheer complexity in how it all works.

Thanks for the helpful response, Mark. I'm pretty happy with how fast most of the websites new and old download their pages as of now. I just don't understand what caused the noticeable slow down that started in January 2018 and returned to normal around the end of June. Further searches brought me to AT&T's community help forums where there were similar experiences even with customers with much higher bandwidth than my 12mbps but of course they didn't describe how slow in seconds. They just quoted their mpbs and that was it. Some of the forum responses were from AT&T administrators and some from forum employees all requiring private messaging to solve the problem. Not a very helpful forum.

Just the explanation I was looking for mainly because it's so dense and over my head that it possesses the right amount of logic that makes me feel good and eases my mind. Can I use this information to increase download speeds? No. But I now have the right lingo to use to ask AT&T if they did any recent changes to their server protocols. I probably should do a search on the subject. I really don't want to get into a long conversation with AT&T's tech support. Thanks for the wiki link. Oh, and can someone suggest a very simple free email service? Yahoo wants me to upgrade to Pro or Premium to get rid of the intrusive ads. See below the inbox piggyback ad that attaches to my emails permanently.

Sorry, Alan, that link is saying I have to update my browser which I can't do. But thanks for the feedback on speed in seconds bandwidth. 1 to 2 seconds is pretty fast. Ookla Speed Test indicates around 15mbps download/1.96mbps upload which is higher than my 12mbps I'm paying AT&T for. Google downloads even faster now at one second but it's cached of course. Previously when everything was very slow it acted like it was taking way too much time to download my login/avatar/notifications icons and tools menu that appear in the upper right corner. Leave Google for other sites and comeback and it would do it all over again as if it wasn't caching or it was downloading newer stuff.

I appreciate all those that provided overall bandwidth speed, but I REALLY, REALLY need to know how many seconds it takes for a website's initial opening page to completely load to where you can hover the cursor over hyperlinks that indicate they are clickable. Just because some websites appear to load their graphic interface completely doesn't indicate whether or not there are other things downloading in the background. I've experienced this time and time again and it is important to know the time in seconds a page completely downloads. It's not that hard to time this. I've asked this several times in this thread and no one is giving any feedback on this. PLEASE report the time in seconds PLEASE! Bandwidth speed according to what's measured by some arbitrary and obscure software off of some ISP provided server I no longer find valuable or valid. REALLY! I've measured my speed the same way and it doesn't give a realistic picture of overall download of how long web pages should fully download.