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Internet Speed, Surfing Incognito, And USB-C Flaws

Q. The Internet in my house seems slower than at my will not see any of the "private browsing" sites in the his­
local coffee shop. How do I measure the speed and com­ tory bookmarks, and browsers take various steps to avoid
pare the two? leaving other traces on your device itself.
A. My favorite test site is located at speedtest.me. But as I have written many times before practically every
Each connection has three numbers: site you visit silently tracks you. Turning on private brows­
Ping, Download, and Upload. Ping measures the latency, ing does nothing to prevent that kind of tracking.
or "raw" speed. Upload and download measure band­ Private browsing will keep your secrets from casual ob­
width, which is to say how long will it take to move a servers who have access to your device, but beyond that
quantity of bits each second. assume everything else has been recorded in multiple plac­
When comparing connections, smaller latency means es. It is not a pleasant thought, but that is reality in 2019.
faster. Bandwidth is reversed, so that bigger is better.
Here is how to think about it. Q. I have several USB-C cables. One came with my An­
Imagine a road filled with cars. The car's speed is laten­ droid phone, another with my digital camera, and I pur­
cy. In other words, how long do you have to wait for the chased one as a spare. Sometimes they work, sometimes
car to arrive at its destination. The total number of lanes they do not. Is there a reliable way to test a cable?
on our imaginary road is the connection's bandwidth. A. USB-C cables have a design flaw that will probably
The more lanes, the more cars it can carry at one time. cause a lot of people to assume a cable is broken.
However, more lanes does not always mean faster. With Up until now in the tech world, each cable had a differ­
enough traffic, any highway can slow to a crawl, or stop ent connector. For decades, cables were easily identifi­able
altogether. · with a casual glance. Different tasks required different ca­
Internet bandwidth is specified in Mbps (megabits per bles, and it was possible to tell which cable was · required
second). While slow by modem standards, even a 1 by the shape of the device
Mbps connection will seem fast for web browsing and port. USB-C changes all that.
email. For large files, like video, 15 Mbps is a good All six variations of USB-C cables use the same connector.
starting point. Each connector should be embossed with an icon describ­
Speed tests are useful to compare, but they have lim­ ing the cable, but that is not always the case. The icons
its. Speeds vary fre­quently due to traffic congestion. To themselves are not especially descriptive, and worse still,
get a good measurement, test multiple times. Test when device ports are often not marked at all.
things are working normally, to get a sense of what aver­ Users can Google search for a USB­C icon chart to help
age means in everyday use. identify a cable's capability. But that is a lot to ask. My only
other advice is to use the cable with the device it came
Q. Is Incognito mode really private? with despite the fact they may look interchange­able.
A. That depends on what you mean by private. Incog­ Because USB-C cables contain a microchip, there is a pro­
nito mode is one kind of private. vision that would allow a device to present an error if you
All the major Web browsers have the ability to open a plug in a mismatched cable. That is very poorly supported
tab for private brows­ing. Browsers use different words right now, but it gives a bit of hope for the future.
for the feature, most commonly "Private" or "Incognito." Sadly, until devices get better at reporting cable errors,
Different words, same behavior. the idea of one connector to rule them all is a big fail.
Anyone who casually looks -at your computer or phone

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