In this post, we'll help you professionally identify and compare the quality of your internet connection for booking appointments on the Prenotami website.
This is a crucial point, and it seems obvious that you need a good internet connection. However, what most people don't know is that "good internet" doesn't mean fast internet.
You hear a lot about the importance of internet speed for getting an appointment, but with our experience, we can assure you that it doesn't matter much. There are two factors more important than speed:
Stability:
Your internet needs to be stable. Okay, but what does that mean? A stable link is one that experiences little to no interference along the entire path between you and your destination, which in our case is the Prenotami server. We'll show you how to check this below.
Low Ping:
If you're younger or a gamer, you might be familiar with this term. Ping is the technical term used to measure the response time between you and a server. The lower this number, the better the website will load, and this time is directly related to your geographical location on the planet! Yes, we're talking about the internet, the digital world, but it's important to understand that the physical location of things greatly influences website performance. The Prenotami website is hosted on a server located in Rome, Italy, which is on the other side of the Atlantic. This means that the website will load slower the farther away you are from Rome.
In theory, everyone in US would have roughly the same ping, which would make the "competition" equal among all the people vying for an appointment with you. But there's a catch: for technical reasons, you might be taking a longer route to the Prenotami server or experiencing some interference at your home or work that's hindering your attempts without you even knowing it.
We'll teach you how to check and compare different connections to find out what the best scenario is for you.
The instructions below are for Windows, but all other operating systems have these tools.
Click on the Windows search bar, type cmd, and press Enter;
A screen similar to this one should open:
To check the ping between you and the Prenotami website, you could simply type ping prenotami.esteri.it and press Enter. However, this won't work, and you'll see something like this::
This "Request timed out." message is an error, and it happens because a few years ago, the Italian technicians blocked the ability to ping all Farnesina websites. (Note: This is really a shame because it was very useful for users to know whether or not their connection was good, but oh well.)
Remember how we said that everything on the internet depends on your geographical location? Well, we discovered that another Italian government agency has a different system hosted in practically the same location and without this ping block. It's not a perfect indicator, but it's very close and a great reference for us to use.
Type ping www.enac.gov.it and press Enter. You'll see something like this:
Take a look at the 4 identical lines and find the information labeled as "time" in each one. In the example above, you'll see time=22ms in all lines, which means that the ping between this computer and the Enac website in Rome is 22 milliseconds. This is the time it takes for a button click on my computer to reach the server. You can test this with any website you want (hotmail, google, etc.).
Now we know how to identify the ping on our computer, and by doing this, you can compare different computers to identify the best option for attempting to book your appointment.
Important: Ignore the value of 22ms because this computer used for this test is located near the Prenotami server since we work in Italy. To give you a baseline, a computer in NYC will have a ping of around 240ms. This is a good reference point for your tests. The important thing is to make a comparison between the options you have access to, such as your home computer, work computer, college computer, etc.
Now let's test the link stability.
Run the same command but with the -n 50 parameter in front. It would look like this: ping www.enac.gov.it -n 50 and press Enter.
This command will increase the number of tests from 4 to 50. What you should look for is a discrepant value or an error ("Request Timeout"), for example: If in the first 20 lines the value was on average 230ms and some line was 500ms and then returned to 230ms it means that for some reason your link has an instability in this route. This is a point of attention and an indicator for you to compare with other connections. Another indicator of a point of failure is the message "Request Timeout", it means that the packet was lost and this happens when the delay for response is greater than acceptable.
You can base yourself on the last line at the end of the execution. It will show the average ping (Average=) and the highest ping (Maximum=). To have a baseline, in a battery of tests with 50 pings, it is acceptable to have at most one outlier when dealing with a connection that is crossing the Atlantic. More than that is worrisome.
On Mac computers, the Ping feature is located in the Network Utility app under the Ping tab. Just type the website, choose the number of pings, and press the button.
The interesting thing is that the Mac shows the standard deviation of the tests which, in our experience, for this type of route should be a maximum of 10-12% of the average ping, that is, in a connection with an average ping of 260ms, a standard deviation of 30ms would be acceptable.
Important: This will not guarantee your success in booking an appointment in any way. What will guarantee it are dozens of details, and we'll try to show you all of them here. The important thing is for you to identify on your own which is the best scenario among the ones you have at hand.
We will always be sharing tips here from people who have been working with this for many years and instructions that are not usually found on the internet. If you liked this post, subscribe to our website to receive news and professional tips first-hand and get ahead in the fierce competition for Prenotami slots.
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