Forums > General Discussion
Download Speeds
johnb:
Hi All,
i'm very new to all this so was wondering what download speed you guys were averaging out at? I will have a 4meg ADSL line tomorrow and my 1 meg is currently downloading at 110kB/s and rising. IS this any good or is there anything you would recommend I look at to better this?
Cheers
Quantum:
Speeds are advertised in megabits per second, but download speeds are calculated in megabytes per second.
There are 8 megabits in 1 megabyte.
So 110kB/s is 110 kilobytes per second is 880 kilobits per second, so that's about 88% of your current maximum theoretical download rate, so that's very good.
Synbios:
There are precisely 8 bits in 1 byte. However since the conversion from bits to kilobit and megabit are factors of 1000, and the conversion from byte to kilobyte and megabyte are factors of 1024, you simply can't say that there are 8 megabits in a megabyte. It's going to be slightly off if you want to be technical.
It's tough to go directly from megabytes to megabits, there are roughly 8.388608 megabits in a megabyte. It's therefore easier to convert whatever you have to bits or bytes, then back to what you want them in.
110 KB/sec is 901.1kbps, so that's even closer to 1Mbps then we thought...
I use the bandwidth calculator on BBR to do my calculations:
http://www.dslreports.com/calculator?sz=&time=&speed=110+KBps&c3=Calc
Back to the point if you get a 4Mbps line, you should be expecting speeds around 488.3 KB/sec, assuming there are ample peers and seeds to download from.
Quantum:
Well no, technically
1000 bits = 1 kilobit
1000 bytes = 1 kilobyte
1024 bits = 1 kibibit
1024 bytes = 1 kibibyte
But that's not important, how the ISPs measure it is important. In the U.K when they say 8 mbps connection they mean 8*1024*1024 bits per second, they may scam you even more in the U.S than they do in the U.K though.
Synbios:
I forgot that you guys use kibibit. In the U.S. we only use kilobyte and kilobit.
For us:
If someone says kB or KB then that's kilobyte. kb or Kb is kilobit.
I have a 8Mbps connection here and it's 976.6 kilobytes a second, which is exactly 8,000,000 bits per second., rather than the slightly faster 8x2^20 which is what it would be in europe.
Even if you guys use kibibit, 1024 bytes should still be a kilobyte though. All the programs I use (uTorrent, etc) report in kilobytes per second, so that's what I use for measurements.
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