8mb Broadband download speed?

Can anyone with this connection speed confirm what their standard download rates are. I seem to get between 250 / 300 kbps which seems a bit low to me?

Cheers
Stevie

I've got 6mbit connection speed, and it tops at around 750kb/s.

How far are you from the exchange?

What's your signal to noise ratio?

If you live far from the exchange, over 3KM you should see speeds of 1- 4 mbit.

go here and find your local exchange by entering your telephone number.

http://www.samknows.com/broadband/index.php

It depends where you're downloading from.

Try downloading something from the Microsoft site - their servers are normally very fast.

I have 8mb and on a good day I can download 1mb in about 4-5s.

Cheers Amon

According to the map I live approx 2.5km away from the exchange. No idea about the signal to noise ratio. Gonna get the ISP to check all this out.

[EDIT] @ GFK , I checked the speed by downloading direct from my website which seems to be about as fast as I've ever got.

Stevie

What sort of setup do you have? Modem? Router? Wired/wireless?

I have a Wired Router.

Ah, its not likely to be your setup that's causing the bottleneck then. Had a few ideas if it was wireless but never mind. :)

I have the same problem with low downloads. My 50 cents are (again) that it is the distance to your exchange.

I'm planning on moving my house a few metres closer...

The chain is only as strong as the weakest link.
most likely slowdowns:

1) If you're on cable (rather than DSL), you're sharing a local loop through your neighborhood. If you have a lot of neighbors online doing big downloads, your maximum possible speeds drop as well
2) The sending server has a limit as well. If a server is behind a T-1 connection, for example, the fastest it can ever send out is 1.5 MBit. Shared by everyone downloading stuff from that server at that time. Doesn't matter if you have 8 Mbit if the sending party can't keep up
3) Your internet service provider has oversold their backbone, and their uplink to the internet may not be big enough to facilitate your maximum speed at certain (or even most) times of day

You can check out some of these things by trying to download several large files at the same time from different hosts -- do additional downloads slow down your downloads already in progress? If so, then the limiting factor is probably your ISP, local loop, or the ISP's uplink.
If additional downloads don't affect the speed of existing downloads, then most liekly the sending server is the limiting factor.

demand money back or price cuts if you don't get the speed you're paying for.
The ISPs gotta be held responsible.

Good luck. Pretty much all of them don't actually guarantee you any bandwidth in their TOS. It's just "up to", no "at least". And of course, once it leaves their network, all speed bets are off.

Cheers folks. I know about the cable issues which is why I'm on DSL.

My ISP moved to a ULL?? 6 months back and say they are still ironing out issues with Torrents / p2p and binary usenet. Need to run some tests at my end.

Stevie

My 3Mbit connection usually gets about 350 kB/s..

Regarding the cable/dsl "issue", it doesn't really matter either way. It all depends on how much the ISP lines are overbooked.
All lines/sentrals are overbooked.. normally by a factor of 10-50 times.
This means that if a provider's node has a 10 Mbit connection to it's supernode, they can (and will) sell 10 Mbit connections to up 10-50 people connected to that node.
(of course, normally, they would sell lower speeds, and cower more customers..).

I have 10mbit cable and I usually only get around 250kb/s - although on a steam download I got 750kb/s.

The new (for the UK) 8 MB ADSL is most definitely "up to" -- most people won't even get close to that speed. ISPs who don't state "up to 8 MB" are just asking for trouble...


This is generally the case for ADSL too -- most UK ISPs run 50-1 or 20-1 contended services (ie. potentially up to 50 lines sharing the same bandwidth, though it's apparently not generally pushed that hard in real life).

Also, the distance from your house to the exchange can be very misleading when it comes to determining the speed you'll get, as the telephone line will almost never be routed in a straight line from your house to the exchange, and the longer the line, the lesser speed you'll get.

Also, BT telephone lines can run past sources of interference, be of poor quality for ADSL (they're only guaranteed to give reasonable quality voice calls at present), etc, etc.


Weird, I have 4 MB cable and get up to about 460 KB if downloading from a decent server... I don't believe cable has anything like the same distance limitations since it's a fibre-optic network.

I got a Dynalink RTA1320, I'm on the Turbo which is the fastest connection you can get, 3.5mbps or something. I download at around 500kbytes a sec.

In Norway, we've had several cases like this in our consumer protection thingys.
I've heard of several people getting price cuts and/or same performance, just a lower speed package by complaining.

Problem is though, not many people know what they're paying for and what they're getting, so ISPs can cheat most of them without a second thought.

I sync at 8Mbit but my connection speed is limited by other conditions on the line. The fastest speed I've downloaded at is 6.6Mb/s (somewhere more than 830K/s).

Try use torrent protocoll.
with it one can see how fast realy connection is.

or use a download manager. and download several files at one time. Like 25 files at one time.