Testing upload/download bandwidth speeds for verification

[Daniel B. Thurman]

Suvayu Ali wrote:
> 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
>
You are correct, over the wire Internet up/down speeds are Kb/s but when
downloading via applications, i.e. via your download program, you see KB/s.

I guess my eyes got crossed somewhere when I wrote :P