Internet speed.

[Mazza]

Okay so we pay for 1.5Mbps, and speed test says i get that but, whenever i download something my max speed is 160Kb/s :-?

I'm on wireless network, not the best single strength 'n' stuff.

Just asking if this is normal.

[a1]

Maybe the server you are trying to download from has a bandwidth cap to keep things running at a constant rate for everyone and not let one person be a bandwidth hog.

[Mazza]

Well then every server want to do that

[Fozzer]

Just to pop in here for a minute......!

My Broadband speed generally indicates 6.2 Mbps (Mega BITS per second), but it seems to have no relationship whatsoever to my "Download Speed" in Mbps, or the speed that the pages open on

[dave3cu]

It comes down to bits and Bytes....

The Mbps advertised is bits.

The KB/s Windows download reports are Bytes.

8 bits per Byte........do the math  

Dave

[SubZer0]

You're not going to get that speed... Ever.

I used to have DSL and I payed for 3 mbps and never got that... My download speeds were 300kb/s max. 6 mbps will get you 800kb/s max I believe.

Eventually I just moved on to cable

[Mazza]

Ah thank you all, and yes Paul dial up speed was not good on our old plan . But now I have fast (to me) Internet

[HarvesteR]

As Dave said, you're paying for megabit rates...

i have a 4Mbps plan at home, and i get up to 500KBps down speed (on a good server)... that's the top limit of what i'm paying for...

there are 8 bits in a byte, so 4Mbit is actually approximately 500Kbytes

it's evil, i know... the ISPs take advantage of the fact that 99% of the population doesn't know enough about computers to note the difference between bits and bytes... so it's selling something that you think is much greater than what you're actually paying for... and of course, they won't ever make an effort to clear up this confusion, as that would be bad for their business...

what annoys me most however, is the fact that, despite the Mbit/Mbyte debacle, the ISPs reserve the right to NOT serve you the contracted speed whenever they wish... they do this for the purpose of 'overbooking' their bandwidth... meaning sell more bandwidth than they can provide, based on the notion that not everyone is at peak usage all the time...

so, if for instance, the ISP has 10Gbps of bandwidth to offer, they will most likely sell out 30Gb... and regulate the speed each user gets based on the amount of usage at each given moment... so no one is actually getting what they pay for

[waspiflab]

Virgin Media 20meg today 8:00pm



had no issues with virgin yet.

http://www.speedtest.net/


On a good day

[T1MT1M]

oh i hate you waspi lol.

Stuck on my 1.5Mb plan

[Fozzer]

I receive 6.2 Mb/s with my 8 Mb/s

[Mushroom_Farmer]

In all my experiences, whether it be commercial dial-up orADSL, download speed has always been arpind 10% of upload speed.
When I was on 56Kb/s dial-up download speed was around 5.9Kb/s on the internet and at times as much as 8Kb/s on IRC. I currently have 4MB/s upload and the fastest download speed I've seen is 560Kb/s.

[Mazza]

[quote]I receive 6.2 Mb/s with my 8 Mb/s

[HarvesteR]

In all my experiences, whether it be commercial dial-up orADSL, download speed has always been arpind 10% of upload speed.
When I was on 56Kb/s dial-up download speed was around 5.9Kb/s on the internet and at times as much as 8Kb/s on IRC. I currently have 4MB/s upload and the fastest download speed I've seen is 560Kb/s.

that's exactly the bit/byte difference... you have a 56KB/s plan, and get around 5.6Kb/s of download speed (note that bits are abbreviated by a lowercase b, while bytes by a capital B)

the actual rate is more like 12.5%... but, usually there's other factors that also play into this mess

Cheers