The important thing to remember about any connection is that you don't get it all. At some point there is traffic besides yours, and you are competing with that traffic for the available bandwidth.
By the way, remember that even a T1 circuit is significantly slower than your local LAN connection. (1.544mb/s versus 10mb/s)
Having said that, you can test your bandwidth for free in a number of ways:
Various sites, such as www.2wire.com have speed tests. All these tests do is move a file back and forth between your computer and their site, and time the transmission. The problem is that what is being measured is throughput to their site, which may be 20 router hops away from you.
You can get a more accurate test if your ISP has an FTP site. It is more accurate because typically only your ISP's network is involved -- not the internet in general.
Using ftp (start button, run, ftp ) log on to their site (user anonymous, password )
Pick a file of some known size from their site (1 meg is a good size). (Use ls to list files, cd to change directories.)
Type bin to ensure a binary transmission.
Type get to retrieve the file. Start a stopwatch when you hit theenter key.
When the transmission finishes, some ftp implementations will tell you the transfer speed. If they don't, divide the number of bytes by the number of seconds.
Exit FTP by typing bye
Good luck.
