History of the Line Speed Meter

Version 1.0

In February 2001 tcpIQ was involved in a presentation for the local development community about the new broadband technology called 'ADSL' that was just being rolled out throughout Australia. Many people wanted to know how its speed compared with Cable that had been around for a couple of years. To test the speed we developed a rather simple web page that both uploaded and downloaded random data to my web site and displayed the results in a table.

Several members of the group started playing one-upmanship to see who had the fastest Internet connection and the application started to draw some interest. The application was not yet suitable for wider distribution and required rewriting from the ground up. Due to the level of interest it received it was worthwhile exploring.

Version 2.0

During March of 2001 the program was fleshed the out. The Line Speed Meter web page allowed it to record your results in a database and then report on these results. All of the test traffic was being sent to a single web server. During those 'good ol' days' bandwidth was cheap and moving 30GB of data per month did not seem to worry my web hoster - until they changed their policy. A new web hoster was soon found. Initially the Line Speed Meter was working really well but the web hoster soon became too popular and the speed of the site slowed down. Finally the Line Speed Meter was measuring the speed of the web site and not the speed of the user's Internet connection!

It had to either turn if off or come up with a better solution.

Version 3.0

In January 2003 we released the beta version of the Line Speed Meter V3.0. The tool was now a stand-alone desktop application that measured its speed against a variety of pre-defined web sites throughout the user's country. Due to a number of technical and professional factors a long beta period of 1 year followed. The program would report any errors back to tcpIQ.com which helped remove the bugs.

The program did not require the bandwidth of the tcpIQ sever and the results became very accurate. Also, the speed could be accurately measured in any country since the Line Speed Meter would test against locally hosted servers.

Version 4.0

Version 4.0 was released in Jul 2006. It was massive development effort, totally rewritten in a different programming language to V3.0

It enables all aspects of the program to be remotely configured ensuring the highest level of accuracy and customisation for corporate clients.

It enables for detection of IP address changes, automatic migration to different profiles, perception survey, periodic connection confirmation and a redesigned user interface.