If you have ever wondered how fast your Internet connection is, there is a way you can test it.  Just go to this website:

          http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/

Choose a Server by selecting the Chicago, IL connection (the closest one to us).

It will test your upload speed and your download speed.

To give you a context for the numbers you will see, your old dialup connection used to give you 56 for the download speed and 56 for the upload speed.  With some of the new services, you can easily find download speeds of well over 3000 and upload speeds over 700.  In our area, using Comcast, I regularly get 15-25,000 download and 2-5,000 upload. 

Faster speeds are important because of all the graphics and music and video that we download with our computers.  They take a lot of bandwidth.  So much better than our old 56k dialup modems.