I don't know exactly why, but American friends always seem to be clueless about the effective bandwidth they have contracted for with their providers.

Most don't know, few are aware of the possibilities to self-test and almost no-one, outside of IT professionals, ever chooses a service based on objective performance.

Also, while most know that they have a broadband, cable or ADSL line service, it remains somehow oblivious to many the curiosity, and desire to know what is the actual level of bandwidth they are being provided with.

Enters Speed-Test, a new, free, simple and effective way to measure your true network connection speed.

Developed by 5GNetworks, SpeedTest(tm) is a network performance measurement tool that accurately checks the speed of either your local network or the one of your Internet connection while also measuring the actual data throughput speed.

SpeedTest, besides being a valuable tool for individual users, is touted as excellent brandable add-on for any Internet Service Provider, allowing customers or subscribers to check speed and performance from their locations.

SpeedTest is freely accessible to anyone wanting to use it, but its business model is built around the greater opportunities offered by Internet Service Providers who, either in an effort to provide more transparency and credibility to their services, or with the goal of offering an extra useful feature to their customers and potential ones, want to integrate a completely branded and personalized Speed Test facility within their Web pages or private Premium site.

SpeedTest allows to select a test file to be used during the test among three possible variants: 25K, 50K and 200KB sized file. The greater the file, the more thorough and reliable the test.

SpeedTest provides the ability to test separately both the download and the upload connection bandwidth.