I have a question for the technically inclined.

[reprobate]

How come it's possible in Great Britain to get 24 MB broadband, while here in the good ol' US of A my supposed 3 MB cable connection is lucky to get 700Kb download speeds.

And they pay not much more than they do for dialup, according to one mag I read. And I pay $49 a month for roadrunner.

I guess that's the advantage of having a capitalistic system, huh?

[bemildred]

1. It's called "marketing".

The idea is to get the most possible money out of the
people you "serve".

[RoyGBiv]

2. A couple things ...

Many things affect this.

Mostly, this is confusion is cased by terminology. The download speed you just reported is better than what your connection's average guarantees, so I'd say you're doing pretty well.

Up front, you should know you do not have a 3MB connection. That, by itself, means nothing. You have a connection with an average download stream speed of 3 megabits per second, or 3 Mbps. All network communication, as well as communication within a computer itself, is measured in terms of bits per second using base ten, not Bytes, which is what the MB implies and what some ignorant or misleading sales people and marketing literature states. Bytes are not figured in multiples of ten.

Now, when you're downloading something, typically the browser or FTP program reports the speed in terms of KB/s, or Kilobytes/second, which causes mass confusion. 1 bytes = 8 bits, so this requires a conversion to arrive at a comparable base ten measurement.

So, you're topping out at 700KB/s download speed. That's 5600 kilobits/s (700*8) or 5.6Mb/sec (5600/1000), better than the average speed your provider is guaranteeing.

All that said, many elements can affect your effective download speed, one of the most important being the path between you and a remote server and any limits that remote server has on its upload speed. Far too many servers and routers still use T-1 lines, which are rated at 1.544 Mbps. So, if you have a 3 Mbps connection and are connecting to a server that is routed through a T-1 anywhere along the line between you and the remote server, you will experience noticeable slow-downs. Note that a direct connection between a home user and a remote server is essentially non-existent. I go through 22 different servers to hit democraticunderground.com, for example. Also, many sites restrict the amount of bandwidth an individual connection can pull, particularly sites that serve large files. Typically, this cap is 512KB/s for commercial services, which is 4096 kbps or about 4.1Mbps. Other sites, such as free FTP servers or privately run servers of varying kinds, will be much lower. If you're downloading a file directly from another individual who has a connection similar to yours, your download speed will be limited by that person's upload speed, which for home users is always much slower than the download speed. If you have a 5Mps connection and hit one of these sites, your speeds will always be slower than what your provider allows.

As for te 24 Mbps connection, this requires a fiber-to-the-home connection, which, at this point, are very rare and typically very expensive. I know next to nothing of the British marketplace, so I cannot comment on the price. I do know, however, that anyone using that connection is going to be sorely disappointed when their connection is routed through or to a download site that won't allow that person to use that much bandwidth all at once. For the most part, people who get these kinds of connections at this point only find them useful if they have their own LANs routed through a single access point for the Internet. A 24 Mbps connection means 6 computers can be connected to the network simultaneously and expect at least a speed of 4 Mbps individually.

[landdaddy]

3. Excellent explaination!............eom