Sonic.net

I have a quick question about downloading, im 7,000 feet away from CO and i ran a speedtest on my connection and got 7 Mb/s download but when i actually downloaded something it kept me at 1 Mb/s., the question i can i tune, or change something to at least give me 4 Mb/s download speed on actual downloads?

It depends where you were downloading from. Maybe the source of your download doesn't have a very high throughput. As users get faster and faster internet connections, we're going to start seeing other 'weak links in the chain'.

if you do a traceroute (or in windows its a tracert) you will see all the machines between you and wherever with a speed rating. For any "just me connecting to xxxxxx" there can be up to 30 machines in the route. For me to download from Sonic.net is very fast. For me to download from somewhere in Europe, not so much

try a speed test to a server on the other side of the globe and check out the differences.

You sure your 1 Mbit download wasn't actually 1 MByte?

8 Mb = 1 MB

Speed test for me shows 11.25 Mb/s. Some sites actually give me a download around 1.3 MB/s, but most are a much lower rate. As wa2ibm suggested, the choke might be at the site from which you're downloading (most likely), or somewhere along the route (less likely), rather than your connection or in Sonic.net's network (least likely).

What happens if you download multiple files (from different sites)? Is the sum of the download rates higher than what you saw on that specific file?

Have you tried Sonic.net's FTP test?

I just found a good "on the web" test you can try.

Maximum PC magazine has PDF downloads of its back issues available for free.

I downloaded the July, 2011, issue for a sustained rate of 1.3 MB/s:



Downloading other issues got the same rate.

Bits and bytes. Mega(thousand)bits versus MegaBytes. Mb vs MB - there are 8 bits in a byte, so on a 7Mbps (small 'b'), getting about 1MBps (big 'B') is about right.

-Dane