My New Apartment and Fast Internet?

Things in my new apartment are great! It's a wonderful place, less than 5 minutes from where I teach my English classes! I have most of my things moved over, so the place is a mess. I'm waiting until I get things put away before I take pictures.

So for now, you have to be satisfied with more photos from my trip!

Conveniently located across the street from my apartment is a nice Internet cafe'. In fact, I'm sitting there as I type this. I talked with them the first day I came about possibly getting a connection run up to my apartment, like other people in surrounding buildings have (it's obvious from the spiderweb of cables running away from the Internet cafe').

The price is decent, so I wanted to check the connection speed. I explained this to the nice guy who runs the place and he agreed.

So...I went to various "Internet Speed Test" websites. Here are the results:

BandwidthPlace -- 343.8 kbps (296 on second try)
CNET Speed Test -- 217.1 kbps (258 on second try)
McAfee Speed Test -- 150 kbps (150 again on second try)
SpeakEasy.net Speed Test -- 616 kbps (422 on second try)
PC Pitstop Speed Test -- 130 kbps (176 on second try)

What accounts for the variation? I think it's that some of the sites allow me to download from a site in/near Egypt, while others are only from America (and come up with slower results)

All in all, I think it's pretty good. From the looks of things, the Internet Cafe' is mostly frequented by kids playing networked computer games. There are only a couple on websites, so that means that I'll mostly be sharing the connection with my neighbors. Once I get the connection in my apartment (I'm pretty sure I'll get it), I'll do a bit of trial/error to see when people are home/downloading and when I get faster speeds.

Cool!