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View Full Version : Need Help With Identifying Connection Speed


setotitan
01-31-10, 07:33 PM
OK so I'm with Brighthouse out of Tampa, FL they used to be Time Warner and they just changed the name so we'd hate them less. Regardless I had 10mb internet, and I just upgraded to 20mb. The thing is I don't see any speed improvement. I download a lot of torrents and a good on hits 800kB/s and I've seen the as high as 1mB/s. Correct me if I'm wrong but with 10mb internet I should be seeing 10mB/s right? I've never seen it over 2. Anyways to further complicate the problem, they Brighthouse has some burst feature that if you're trying to download a huge amount of information it will just open your connection up as wide as possible for 10-15 seconds. The intent was supposedly to make sure you didn't lag in case that was a huge packet or something. The result is anytime I go to SpeakEasy or SpeedTest. So I can't get a read on what my connection speed is because of the burst technology my results are always off.

Long story short, I need a solid way I can get a real accurate result of how fast my internet connection is. Whatever it involves I'm in. Because every time I call, they "test my connection" and say everything is fine the speed is a showing 20mb. However why is it when i'm downloading a file, like right now at 700kB/s is the internet hanging. Taking 10-15 seconds to load a page, and sometimes just coming back with a timeout error. I tried it on FireFox, Chrome, and IE with the same result. All advice is welcome.

RJARRRPCGP
01-31-10, 08:28 PM
Correct me if I'm wrong but with 10mb internet I should be seeing 10mB/s right?

Mb = mega bit, NOT mega byte!

IrishAssassin
01-31-10, 08:30 PM
Megabytes is not the same thing is as megabits.

http://speakeasy.net/speedtest/ Choose the closest location, run the speedtest and report the results.

setotitan
02-01-10, 08:37 AM
So there's roughly10 megaBITs in 1 megaBYTE. So if I have a 20 megaBIT connection I'm probably never going to see much over 2 megaBYTEs download speed right?

setotitan
02-02-10, 04:02 PM
so silence is acceptance?

Drew@PSU
02-02-10, 05:08 PM
You pay for 20 Megabit per second service. There are 8 bits in a byte, so 20 Megabits per second / 8 bits in a byte = 2.5 Megabytes per second. That is max theoretical speed, so take out some for overhead and other such things. So yes, about 2 MegaBYTES down is about right. Now you are limited by the amount of up-loaders, the latency upstream of you, and many other things. Hopefully that helps you out.
-Drew