Your Connection — what is my IP and speed test

How to use Connection

"It is not connecting" describes a symptom, not a cause. The way to make progress is to test one layer at a time from the nearest outward, because each working layer eliminates everything beneath it. Is the local link up — cable in, wireless joined, adapter enabled.

Does the device have an address on the network. Can it reach the local gateway. Can it reach something on the wider internet by address. Can it resolve names into addresses. Work down that list in order and the first failure tells you where the problem is. Jumping straight to the last step is what turns a two-minute fix into an afternoon.

The classic false diagnosis

When some sites load and others do not, the connection is working and name resolution is not. When everything is slow but nothing fails outright, the connection is working and something upstream is congested. When one application fails while others work, the connection is fine and the application has its own problem. Each of these gets reported as "no connection", and each has a different fix.

Turning it off and on again works so often not because it is magic, but because it forces every layer to re-establish itself in the correct order — which is what you were going to do by hand anyway.

Speed, capacity and delay

Three different things get called speed and behave nothing alike. Capacity is how much data can move per second. Latency is how long a single round trip takes. Stability is whether either of those stays consistent.

Large downloads care about capacity — more is faster, latency barely matters. Video calls and games care about latency and stability — a fast connection with variable delay performs worse than a slower steady one.

Page loading cares about latency more than people expect, because a page makes many small requests in sequence. This is why upgrading to a higher-capacity plan often changes nothing for the complaint that prompted it. If calls were breaking up, capacity was not the problem, and buying more of it does not help.

Wireless is a shared medium

A wireless connection shares airspace with every other device using it, including ones that do not belong to you. Performance drops with distance, with walls, with the number of active devices, and with interference from neighbouring networks on the same channel. None of this appears in the connection's reported speed, which describes the link to the access point rather than anything beyond it.

The consequence is that a wireless connection showing full signal can still be unusable, and the diagnosis has nothing to do with the signal indicator. Where a problem matters and a cable is possible, a cable removes an entire category of variables from the investigation.

Intermittent problems

A connection that fails sometimes is harder to fix than one that fails always, because every test you run is likely to pass. The only reliable approach is to record continuously rather than test occasionally — leave something running that logs reachability over time, then look at when the failures cluster. Time of day, a specific device joining, or a regular scheduled task on the network will often show up immediately in that record and never in a spot check.