My Surfing Speed Was Noticeably Faster upgrading DSL from 12 to 18, Why?

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Peachesbackwards

Member
As an experiment, I upgraded my DSL service from 12 to 18 MBPS and found my surfing speed (the time it took me to click a site to the site fully loading) seemed to be alot faster even though I regularly have been told that while downloading speed will be faster, just the speed surfing the internet won't really change. Can someone please explain why just surfing did get faster for me? I have Windows 7 computer, Core 2, 8GB Memory and use Chrome as my Browser. I changed nothing except upgrading my DSL speed from 2 to 18. I welcome your comments. Thanks Oh PS My downloading speed increased greatly
(in case this wasn't clear in my original writing).
 
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Sometimes, when you get to that high speeds, server speed will start being a bottleneck and a lot of delays will come from network latency (usually unaffected by bandwidth) and establishing/managing connections to the server rather than actually waiting for the data to be transmitted.

Of course, if you visit sites with a lot of content or sites that are hosted on servers that don't limit connections or throttle individual connections too heavily, the above won't apply and you will notice a difference.

There's also the fact that higher speed connections tend to have lower speeds in proportion to their theoretical bandwidth. That is, while you may be hitting around 90% of your theoretical download speed on an 1mbps connection, you might only get around 60% of your theoretical max speed on a ~20mbps connection. It all depends on how close to the exchange you are located, volume of traffic in the network and what condition the infrastructure happens to be in. Some people get less lucky and see absolutely no gain if they use internet during peak hours on a crappy network, but you just might've had it better that those who tell you it's not going to help.
 
So if I'm hearing you right, there are alot of factors that could be allowing my increased DSL speed to actually make surfing the web faster that may not apply to other people with the same increased speed due to these other factors. Therefore it could be a Myth that increased High Speed Internet Speed won't increase your surfing speed, it possibly can though not always depending on other factors.
 
I'm not sure where you got the info that your surfing speed wouldn't be faster with a faster connection, only your download speed would increase. In reality surfing IS downloading, when you click on a link to load a web page there can be text, images and videos that get downloaded to populate that page. A faster connection will download those items in less time.

When you have a really fast connection, often times the limiting factor is the server at the other end, the site might be hosted on an antiquated, slow server or may be overly taxed by too many users accessing it at the same time. This would explain why you might not see an increase in surfing speed.

Generally speaking though, a faster connection should result in faster surfing because, unless you have previously visited a particular website so that the various objects have been cached locally, they have to be downloaded and a faster connection means less download time.

What someone may have been trying to tell you is that you may not PERCEIVE the increase in surfing speed. If a web page took .5 seconds to render under your old connection but now renders in .35 seconds, you may not be able to notice that difference although it can be measured.
 
As far as the info, it seems to have been a standard comment online at computer related forums that if you already have high speed broadband service and you increase your speed to say 50% more, that while your downloads will certainly be faster, your surfing speed would not show a noticeable speed increase cause 1.5 MBPS is the fastest the website your surfing too sends out data. I get that this might not always be so, I'm an example, because of various external factors at times.
 
I guess when you pay more you get a better service. They might also different settings to your line, which can have a good difference in speed/stability.
 
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