we got thier internet yesterday and when i downloaded a video, it said it was downloading at around 700kbps. we bought 6mbps. what is wrong, how come it is so slow? and what is that speed boost thing? how do i use it? we bought the package with tv, phone and internet. we have 3 tvs that we watch stuff on and 2 of them have the digital things like a dvr, sort of except they don't record things. help.
2007-05-01 10:57:55 · 6 answers · asked by Anonymous in Computers & Internet ➔ Internet
The download speed your seeing is how fast the actual video data is coming into you. It doesn't measure the full amount of data going over the connection.
Go to a web site like http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/ to verify your real bandwidth. You probably have 6Mega "bits" per second. The transfer rate of a file is subject to a lot of overhead, depending on the protocol your using 20%-60% of the bits your transferring are overhead. The Internet uses Internet Protocol, which further breaks down to sub protocols like TCP, UDP, RTP, HTTP.......(there is whole alphabet soup of IP protocols). You are receiving an Ethernet "frame" which contains an IP packet, which is using one of the sub protocols depending on what your doing.
Also, you have Ethernet between your cable modem and you. Ethernet, on a good day, with a tail wind is only about 30-50% efficient.
The next thing in the equation is how fast your PC can consume the data coming at it. Part of that overhead in the IP protocols is a handshake between the sender and receiver to see if they received the packet that was sent. If your PC is busy doing a zillion different things it might not respond quickly slowing everything down.
Also keep in mind there could be a bottleneck on the sending side. If your going to a service that is pushing out a lot of different streams of data through a single connection, it's suffering from a similar problem as you do on the receive side, only it's the send side.
Bottom line, there are many many different things that can effect your performance.
I have Comcast too, and I can tell you it's a damn good service. My connections at home are just as fast as the ones I have in the office and my company connects to the Internet through a DS3 (45Mbps). But I have a whole network of "stuff" between my pc at work and the Internet connection.
Speed boost is between your cable modem and Comcast I believe. I don't think you need to do anything to make use of it. Every once in a while I get an email from Comcast telling me to reboot the cable modem - for some speedboost enhancement they have.
2007-05-01 11:17:21 · answer #1 · answered by I Like Stories 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
You probably misread that. It probably said 700kB/sec which equals to about 5.6Mbps. Also internet speed is subjective from server to server so you may not always get the maximum alloted bandwidth from your connection.
Speed boost is weird - I also have the 6Mbps and sometimes I can get upwards of 1.3-3MB/s when I'm using usenet, torrenting, or using a robust server. It's all automatic so you don't need to configure anything.
To monitor your bandwidth get this tool: http://www.dumeter.com/download.php it keeps track of daily, weekly, and monthly totals for both uploading and downloading.
Lol, I took that download test the above poster provided and here's what I got: http://i20.photobucket.com/albums/b238/sr111/wtf.png did you get something similar?
2007-05-01 11:02:19 · answer #2 · answered by [ΦΘΚ] ﮎl4CK3R 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
ur tv's, phones and internet prolly share the same line, so if u arnt watching tv or on the phone its faster. 6mps is the fastest it goes, u will not get that speed all the time. maybe the prog ur using to dl has a limited buffer? also time of day comes into play, if more people in ur neighbor hood are watching tv and stuff it can affect ur speed, my connection is twice as fast at 1 am than at 7pm.
2007-05-01 11:03:27 · answer #3 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 1⤋
6Mbits means 6 mega "bits" per second or 6 million bits persecond. The 700kBps you see from internet explorer or Firefox means 700 kilo "Bytes" per second or 700,000 bytes per second. If we do the math knowing that there are 8 bits in every 1 byte. We'll find that you are downloading at roughly 5.6Mbits per second.
2007-05-01 11:04:07 · answer #4 · answered by Waypo 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
You sure it wasn't 700KB/sec? That would be 5.6mbps. Also, where you download from has a lot to do with the final speed.
Check your speed here:
http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/
2007-05-01 11:01:07 · answer #5 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
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2016-10-14 07:12:00 · answer #6 · answered by Erika 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋