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RxTx measures the data transfer bandwidth between your computer and multiple servers. It works with Dial-Up, Cable or DSL connections.
Bandwidth is measured by downloading one or more HTTP files and averaging the received data rates. You can specify a number of Internet addresses (or files) as they appear on your browser Address bar. The download speed is lower for binary files than for text (ASCII) files so you should choose both binary (.jpg, .gif, .exe, .zip) and text (.html, .asp, .txt) files for test.
Note that when you have your modem compression enabled and download the main HTML file of a Web page youll get the highest bandwidth for that particular site. This is because the file is ASCII and also you get the servers attention. As a general rule, the bandwidth for binary files from the same site will be 50% lower.
In addition, RxTx displays in real time instantaneous and average data rates. The data rates are shown in Kbps (Kilo bits per second) or KB/s (Kilo Bytes per second).
Below is an example of a 56K modem downloading a zip, txt, jpg file then a Web site. This snapshot was taken using RxTx 3.2. You can see that the receive rate is about 40 Kbps for compressed files (zip, jpg) but averages about 90 Kbps (peeks at 135 Kbps at the end of file) for txt files. |
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