Bandwith Problem?

Question

I download free trials of anti-virus software from download.com quite frequently. I am paying for a 1mb connection, but I never even get speeds anywhere near that. The most I have gotten is 200KB/s. Is AT&T limiting my bandwith?

Answer 1

Perhaps you are paying for 1 MBPS connection, which is 1 megaBITs per second - that are the units that most ISPs use.
If that is the case, 1 megaBITs per second makes about 125 KiloBYTES per second (divided by 8), so 200 kbytes/s sounds about right.

If you are paying for 1 MegaBYTE per second connection, then you may have a problem to address with AT&T. However, download speed may be limited not only by your network capacity, but also by web server's capacity.

Try http://www.speedtest.net

Answer 2

Beyond the answer above mentioning the conversion of bits into bytes, there are other factors to also consider.

1. With DSL service, your speed is a "Best Effort" service. This means that depending on how far you are from the DSLAM, as well as the overall line quality, could impact your connection speed. A noisy connection would still mean your DSL modem would have to renegotiate the connection speed in order to compensate for noise. A good rule of thumb is to power-cycle the DSL modem about once a week anyways to allow it resync at it's faster speed since it will slow down over time.

2. Source bandwith. Even though you may get X amount of speed/bandwith.. The uploader has their own bandwith to deal with.

3. General network lag.

Answer 3

Call AT&T and ask them.

TIP: 200KBps (Kilo Bytes per second) is = 180000Kbps Kilo bits per second) or about 180 MBps, way more than they promised, so you may just be befuddled a bit by the math.

It may also be that the servers are limiting your download pipe due to high volume at their end. Try before 7 AM or after 11 PM.