Every speed test you've ever run measured your Wi-Fi, not your internet.

My internet comes into the house through a box in the front corner of the main floor. That is where the installer stopped walking. There is a basement under it and a second floor over it, and neither of those came up while the box was being mounted.

I pay for a gigabit. Tonight I ran a speed test on the main floor, the same floor as that box, and got 696 down. Then I went upstairs and ran the same test again. 602.

I have been doing this for a long time and I still had the same small thought everybody has. That is not a gig.

The number on your bill is measured before the Wi-Fi starts

There are two separate things in your house and nobody has ever introduced them to you as separate.

The first is the line coming in from the street. Fiber, cable, whatever your provider ran. That line ends at one box, and the speed you signed up for is a description of that line.

The second is the Wi-Fi. The radio signal that box throws through your floors and walls to everything you actually touch.

You pay for the first one. You have only ever used the second one.

Every speed test you have run in your life, on a phone or a laptop, standing wherever you happened to be standing, measured the second one.

My provider has an app with a speed test built into it, and it does something the websites cannot. It measures the line at the box first, then it measures the trip from the box to the phone in my hand, and it shows you both.

1003 down to the box. 632 down to the phone.

Both of those are my internet. Neither one of them is wrong.

Some of it is supposed to disappear

Wi-Fi is radio. It goes through drywall, it bounces off the refrigerator, it shares the air with your neighbor's network and your own doorbell and the microwave over the stove. Every one of those takes a little.

Then your device gets a vote. An older laptop, a phone with a smaller antenna, a TV sitting inside a cabinet. They will all pull a different number off the same box in the same second, and none of them will be broken.

None of that is damage. It is the price of not running a cable to every room in the house, and almost all of us decided a long time ago that was a fine trade.

The number was already enough

Netflix publishes the speed it wants. I checked it today. Fifteen for 4K, three for regular HD. Those are megabits, the same unit as the 696 and the 602 up there and the number on your bill.

My worst number tonight was 602.

That is forty times what a 4K movie asks for. If four people in this house each started their own 4K movie in four different rooms at the same moment, the whole house would be using about sixty. I would have more than five hundred left sitting there with nothing to do.

Nobody selling internet is going to open with that.

The number that actually moved

There is a smaller number on that same screen that almost nobody reads. It is labeled ping, sometimes latency. It is not how much arrives. It is how long the other end takes to answer, counted in milliseconds, which are thousandths of a second.

Downstairs I was at 6 milliseconds. Upstairs I was at 17. Both of those are far too fast for a person to notice. A blink takes at least a hundred.

The download number dropped about thirteen percent between those two floors. The response time nearly tripled.

Response time is the one that shows up on a video call. When somebody freezes in the middle of a sentence and then catches up in a rush, that is almost never a shortage of speed. It is delay, or pieces of the call arriving late, or a few of them not arriving at all.

Both of my numbers are good. Seventeen milliseconds is nothing. There is no problem in my house tonight. What there is, is a box in the front corner of the main floor, where the installer left it, that I have never moved.

What to do when they offer you a faster plan

Before you say yes, run the test twice.

Once standing right next to the box your internet comes into, on Wi-Fi, the same way you always have.

Once in the room where the trouble actually happens.

Then read the two numbers next to each other.

If the far room is close to the near room, your Wi-Fi is doing its job and the plan is not what is bothering you. A faster plan raises the number at the box, and the box was never where you were losing anything.

If the far room is a fraction of the near room, you have a coverage problem, and that one is real. Back in issue 006 I wrote about going from a single router to a mesh system, meaning a few small units spread around the house that act as one network. That is the fix for it. It costs less than two years of a plan upgrade and it changes what happens in the far room, which a faster plan will not.

If both rooms are low, including the one standing next to the box, that is the one case where the line itself is worth a phone call.

On any phone or computer, open a browser and go to fast.com or speedtest.net. Both are free and neither one wants an account.

Your provider's own app usually has a test in it as well. Mine splits the result into the two numbers I showed you. Not all of them do, so if yours gives you one number, use the two-room method instead.

One Simple Win

Run the speed test twice tonight. Once standing next to the box your internet comes into. Once in the room where the video calls go bad. Write down both results, including the small number labeled ping.

Four minutes. And the next time somebody offers to sell you a faster plan, you will know which number they are talking about.