Testing upload/download bandwidth speeds for verification

[Suvayu Ali]

Hi Daniel,

Daniel B. Thurman wrote:
> Of the several sites I have tried, they all more or less
> seemed to be in close agreement with one another in
> terms of the bandwidth speeds, i.e. my connection
> speed is quoted at 768KB/s up and 3MB/s down,
> and the farther away from central, the more reduced
> is the speeds are.
> 
> The average speed tools says that I have measured
> speeds of 720-30 KB/s up and 2.0-5MB/s down.
> 
> Why is it however, that when downloading software
> from the various Linux/M$ and other downloads sites
> I am seeing on average, speeds of 200-320(max) KB/s
> and never see anything much faster than that?
> 
> Is this normal?
> 

Pardon me if this seems rather dumb or has been addressed by another 
post in the thread (I haven't gone through the whole thread), but are 
the speeds for your ISP KBps/MBps or Kbps/Mbps? Note the 
capitalized/small `B's.

If the speeds are in Kbps/Mbps, then what you get is normal. KBps/MBps 
would be Kilobytes/Megabytes whereas Kb/Mb would be Kilobits/Megabits. 
It is common practice to quote bandwidth speeds in bits rather than 
bytes. To convert between the two just divide by 8,
i.e. 2Mbps / 8 = 256KBps

-- 
Suvayu

Open source is the future. It sets us free.