Speed Query

[Chushajo]

I apologise if this has been covered before, but I did search and couldn't find and answer.

I'm with sky on the broadband unlimited package. I use a wired connection (15m ethernet cable) and replaced all related wiring in the house prior to switching to sky. They state up to 14Mbps on the website and on speedtest I get 14.72Mbps, however, when downloading (steam, psn, netflix, newsgroups, etc) I get a max of 1.7Mbps.

So my question is, what's going on to cause that massive performance gap?

 

[Stevenage Neil]

Units?

 

[Chushajo]

Units?

I don't follow.

 

[EndlessWaves]

Do you get 1.7 Mbps (megabits per second) or 1.7MBps (megabytes per second) when downloading? There are 8 bits per byte so 1.7MB/s is equal to 13.6 Mb/s

Well, being perfectly accurate there are slightly more than 8 megabits to the megabyte, so 1.7MBps is actually 14.26Mbps.

(1.7*8*2^20)/(10^6)

 

[Stevenage Neil]

Do you get 1.7 Mbps (megabits per second) or 1.7MBps (megabytes per second) when downloading? There are 8 bits per byte so 1.7MB/s is equal to 13.6 Mb/s

Well, being perfectly accurate there are slightly more than 8 megabits to the megabyte, so 1.7MBps is actually 14.26Mbps.

(1.7*8*2^20)/(10^6)

 

[Miss Chief]

As I get 20meg and can download at 2MB per second that sounds spot on. Just a bits and bytes mix up.

 

[Chushajo]

Doh! Thanks for the help guys.

 

[AVRocky]

Connection speed doesn't mean throughput speed. One of the common misconceptions. If you want to know the maximum download speed you can get on a connection, just divide that figure by 8.

 

[EndlessWaves]

Connection speed doesn't mean throughput speed. One of the common misconceptions. If you want to know the maximum download speed you can get on a connection, just divide that figure by 8.

No, the division by 8 is for two different types of measurement rather than the difference between connection (sync) speed and download speed (which is just a few percent).