Internet line can be compared to a sort of pipe and connection speed is the water passing from that pipe.
For this reason:
1. Our provider doesn’t supply us with water but he just provides us with a pipe and we just pay for our pipe real capacities (the real amount of water that can pass through it);
2. The source of our water is not our ISP but it comes from another tab (the server we are connected to).Here you can get some information in order to verify whether your connection is really a slow one or you just made a possible wrong estimation.Megabit and Megabyte:
how to understand lines real speed.
For a 4 Mbps (Megabit per second) line people think of a 4 Mb/sec (Megabyte per second) download speed. Be careful: one byte corresponds to 8 bits; one kilobyte corresponds to 1024 bytes; one megabyte corresponds to 1024 kilobytes. Such a high quantity of speed measures variables usually generates a sort of confusion, created on purpose by the commercial system.Here you have a list of an hypothetical 4Mbps line, which is translated in bit, bytes and megabytes:A Mbps line downloads no more than:4 Megabit per second500 Kbyte per second0.5 MegaByte per secondSo, a 100 Mb file, with a 4 Mbps line, should need 200 seconds time download, with a browser indicating a 500kb/sec download speed.The minimum guaranteed bandTherefore, all operators guarantee a really minimum speed much lower than the one in force in all commercial networks.
For a more detailed idea of ADSL lines performances, you must calculate as done before, considering the minimum guaranteed band and not the commercialized speed.Anyway, take care: the minimum guaranteed band is often indicated in kilobit! But your PC can show a kilobyte speed where 1 kilobyte corresponds to 8 kilobit. Is that clear? You should divide the minimum guaranteed band for 8 and the result will be the value that should be then shown in your PC during the download (in case it shows it in kilobytes).
Let’s take a 10Mb file, that must be downloaded on a PC, and let’s give a glance to the maximum download speed supposed to be as the guaranteed band varies:• 128 Kilobit/sec.- > 11 minutes download at the maximum, with a transfer speed of 16 Kilobyte/sec.• 256 Kilobit/sec.- > 5,5 minutes download at the maximum, with a transfer speed of 32 Kilobyte/sec.• 512 Kilobit/sec.- > 2,5 minutes download at the maximum, with a transfer speed of 64 Kilobyte/sec.
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