Slow speed on 4Mbps

[mancombseepgood]

I have been on 4Mbps for a while now and was getting great speeds until recently. I thought it was country-wide, but at a colleagues place I saw consistent international downloads of 3.5Mbps or thereabouts - he is on a neighbouring exchange.

I am going to call telkom tomorrow and if they cant fix it, I will downgrade.

 

[boramk]

what are your speeds?
how far are you from the exchange?

 

[mancombseepgood]

Ok - just discovered the problem lies with my internal cabling. I am rehashing it... amazing, cos the modem synchs at 4Mbps but the speeds being reported are around 400k per second...
Then when I plug in at the cable just after it enters the house, the speed is up to 3.7Mbps!!!

 

[davidpey]

Hey Groundnut,

I'd be interest to know, what is your average download speed from international sites?

I always hear people talking about megabits being different to megabytes. But according to those two links, they are the same thing. So essentially if what I'm asking is true, you should be downloading mp3s or any files under 5mb in just over 1 second?

Cheers,
David

 

[qinglung]

8 bits = 1 byte
4 megabits/s = 0.5 megabytes/s = 500 kilobytes/s

Because of overhead and error correction the best you can get is about 400 kilobytes/s, so your 5MB file will download in about 12 seconds on a 4Mbps line.