Speed checks on my highspeed connection are in the 700 to 800 kb/sec range checking on several sites but the highest dl speed I get from Wiki is 17.7 kb/sec.... feels like the world before highspeed and I can't even imagine what its like for those who don't have hs.
Wiki downloading
(6 posts) (5 voices)-
T8, your internet connection speed only determines the maximum "theoretical" speed.
Actual transfer speed, depends on the sending site and conditions between the sending site and yourself.
As you can see, there are is a lot of opportunity for a rapid error-free download to be far from optimal (by the time the data finally gets to you).
I have friends who have purchased the fastest internet connection available to them, yet feel "ripped off" when their speed is less "than promised".
Internet speed is like a chain that is only as strong as its weakest link.
Posted 16 years ago # -
Extreme? No, no, I wouldn't call them extreme cases. Not at all.
Also, let's not forget that speeds are usually advertised in bits per second (bps, kbps, Mbps, etc.) whereas speeds are usually measured in bytes per second (Bps, kBps, MBps, etc.; note the capitalizations). For those who don't know or have forgotten, 8 bits = 1 byte. If your advertised upload speed is 400 kbps, for example, your fastest upload speed will be 50 kBps - this is normal.
Also, let's not forget to account for overhead. If you have a 400 kpbs upload, you'll probably get about 45 kBps transfers for two reasons: One, you likely have other things going at the same time, and two, the rest of the bandwidth is being used for te overhead, i.e., describing where the data is going. Think about it this way: To send something via snail mail, you have to package it up, label it, and address it. This "packaging" is the overhead: It contains where the data is going, where it came from, and so on.
So it's often a question of how you measure it. By the way, similar effects happens to hard drive sizes.
Finally, never expect to top your speeds if you're only doing one transfer from one point to another - not going to happen. You don't have the bandwidth, and neither do they - likely their systems (and even your own), somewhere, are deciding (quite intentionally) not to allocate all the available bandwidth to one particular transfer. This is why download accelerators (esp. those that use segmented downloads) work so well: They create multiple transfers, thus raping the connection for more bandwidth. It's, well, cheating the system. Some packet scheduling systems are immune to this, some aren't.
Oh, and I haven't even got into latency yet... but that's already been mentioned. ;)Posted 16 years ago #
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