Hat tip to Steve Gibson of Gibson Research Corporation for recommending this network analysis tool from the International Computer Science Institute at Berkeley.
This small Java applet tests your connection to the rest of the world by examining your DNS provider to even the size of the buffer in your router. Believe it or not many of today’s routers offer too much buffer memory. Run the app and it explain why this is a problem.
A buffer that is too large can cause issues with chat and voice applications if you are moving a large file on the same network. Latency can be up to 6 seconds.
How do you fix this buffer size issue? Good question without an easy answer. It is going to require router manufacturers to manage the buffer better or shrink the size of the buffers. We can only hope that router manufactures will push out firmware updates that will improve buffer management.