SCREW DSL Reports! They're the fricking worst way of measuring your download speeds possible.
If you must use a simple little applet to test your speeds, use Speakeasy. They're usually very well connected to a backbone and reasonably accurate. They've also got PoP's all over the country, so you can get one close (DSLReports has what, 2 places to test from?).
You can go to
this page to find the site closest to you.
Note that I don't use Speakeasy DSL, but a co-worker does, and that's how I know about it. And every time I've used it, it's been more accurate than DSL Reports or 2Wire.
The MOST accurate however would be to use your OWN ISP's ftp server to do a transfer of a large file. Assuming your ISP has one (most do), combine several files into something like a 5 to 10 meg file (Winzip can do this for you, doesn't matter if it's compressed or not). Then upload the file either into your own directory on the ftp server if you've got a login (depends on the ISP) or into their temporary/incoming directory (usually /pub/incoming). You can't get a directory listing of the incoming directory usually. This will tell you your upload speed AT THAT MOMENT. Then just download your file back to yourself (if using a graphical FTP client, this may not be easy since you can't get a directory listing sometimes). This will tell you your download speeds.
The reason to use your ISP's server is that you can find out more accurately what your OWN DSL line can handle, without needing to be concerned about bottlenecks outside your ISP's network. Your ISP's servers are usually only a few hops away, and you can generally depend on the links between their own servers being much faster than your own connection.
If you ever complain to your ISP about slow downloads, and tell them that you used DSL Reports to measure it, they'll likely laugh at you (I do, though not directly to my customers). No ISP can guarantee that you'll get the full speed of your connection when downloading from somewhere outside their own network. The connection speed is the MAXimum that you can expect to get IF you're connecting to something that is able to serve you at that speed AND if nothing in between bottlenecks it.
I'd also recommend getting NetStat Live from AnalogX (
www.analogx.com). It sits in your system tray measuring throughput on your network connection as well as several other things (configurable), and you can glance at it anytime to get an idea of what your real speeds are, which is useful when you've got several things all downloading at once.
Download Accelerator I've never used, but I use FlashGet which I believe works similarly. It opens multiple download sessions of a single file from that server (and can search for mirrors sometimes), and starts downloading multiple parts of the file at the same time. So if you have a slow server, say, it can only send 2KBps per connection, you can have 5 connections open and get 10KBps and get the file in 1/5th the time.