Speed figures don't add up

[Dolby]

Right - I didn't know what title to give this

But borrowed the black speedstick (21mbps) and decided to try it on my own system before buying it. I run 64 bit Windows 7 - and had no issue.

My signal was 98% and the noise was between -79 and -85. Speedtest gave me 2mbps down and 2mbps up with a local ping of between 50-60mbps and international 300-350mbps. I am on HSPA+

Real life download (from Microsoft .com) was 100kb/sec.

Basically - browsing feels *much* faster and it's actually unreal to use - yet the download figures don't 'show' that it's that amazing.

What would cause the speed in browsing? The ping?

Vodacom gave me 250ms on their own speedtest to the tower

 

[Ry4n]

You cant ping in mbps all ping times should be in ms - ping measures the time the data takes to get to the destination server and back it doesn't evolve measuring the amount of data - sure you can increase the amount of data you ping but thats about it.

 

[Dolby]

That was a typo - international ping is 300-350ms.

 

[Synaesthesia]

Real life download (from Microsoft .com) was 100kb/sec.

Try another download, and see if your auto-update isn't running at the same time. (could be using your bandwidth). I usually get at 300-550kb/s

 

[UnUnOctium]

Either placeboic or you were lucky in that you got a high-speed burst when browsing.

 

[xera]

Yes I think ping helps with page loads, cause before the page can load, you have to establish a connection to the remote server, and request the page.. before it can start downloading....
Some web pages establish multiple connections, but that can also depend on the contents of the page, which browser you're using and what version of HTTP the browser uses.

 

[TheMightyP]

The speed you get will depend on a number of factors. I'm no expert, but 2 that I can think of are your physical distance from the tower (you might have a good signal, but speeds might still be lower) and also the contention on that base station at the time (if there are 15 other people using the same tower, your speed might not be as good).

 

[kidnotorious]

I'm guessing its lower latency