Download speeds question

[jaystarter]

Background: My internet is provided through the phone line ADSL which by the admission of the company BT is poor and long way from the exchange therefore internet speeds are hardly worthy of this day and age currently lucky to get an IP profile of 2MB. This achieved after trial and error of several routers, changing internal wiring so that router connects to the master socket and lots of frustration.
Anyway, I like to monitor my internet bandwidth usage and speeds using a simple monitor. I reaslise this would not be accurate and only a guide, but it does give an idea of whats going on and when speeds are at a crawl when surfing around. On usual use or doing a "speed test" this monitor shows a download speed around 1.9mb. As expected. However I've noticed that if I connect to certain sites to download a programme or maybe a streaming video the monitor goes way up showing from 3mb - 4mb. (the pic is downloading Firefox4) How can this be? I would have thought the max speed would be the 1.9mb which according to test results is the best able to achieve. I have done a screen shot compilation to show what I see.

[StuartR]

Maybe your ISP has good caches, and you are fetching FF4 from a server that is very close to the termination of your connection. If the speed test involves linking across the internet from the ISP site to some other site this could account for the difference.

[Argus]

One explanation could be that there are differences between the servers, and their locations, thus also differences in the networks between these servers, which you are connecting to when you get these different values. How have you come to the conclusion of around 2 Mbit/s? Ideally one should measure at a good server close to ones gateway to the Internet, with a good tool. That would indicate the maximum download "speed".

One could also discuss how it's being measured, but you are using the same software in these cases. For example it could be errors in the software that make it difficult to compare with other values, from other sources, but your different values comes using the same software. So then one has to discuss what you are comparing; is 1.9 Mbit/s an average, using all kinds of servers or is it indeed a max. "speed".

Even though not that likely, along the lines of the first comment, say that my average "speed" is X and then I download some software, say Fx, and they point me to a mirror in my own country, hooray, yes, not that likely, even though I know that we have mirrors here, then I most probably would get a better download "speed" than my average X, but not necessarily my max "speed".

Then, as you say, with ADSL the distance to the telephone exchange is important, and if the cable length is some kilometres then 2 Mbit/s isn't that odd.

When you get these odd values, above what you believe is your average "speed", you can check the downloaded file properties to get an approximate value. I know that several don't trust the time stamps, and of course if one use some download manager one could get odd values, but if not using that I have found that it's a quite good measure of the download "speed" for a particular file at that time from that server. It's not necessarily the max. "speed" since that depends on server load, how many parallel connections were used etc. It still doesn't explain why you sometimes see 4 and above, instead of around 2; but if 2 is "on usual use", I would call that an average, and then differences between servers, networks, line quality (ADSL can sometimes be quite sensitive) could explain the difference. Or something in the software you are using to monitor the internet bandwidth.

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[jaystarter]

2mb is the Max. Probably something to do witrh servers as stated. Off topic I've now lost interest as just changed to IE 9 and cant see the attached images, can't MS get anything right?

[JoeP]

It is NOT Microsoft. It is a bug in the Lounge software. See Imaged not displayed in IE9.

Joe

[HansV]

As Joe says, it's a problem on our side which we unfortunately haven't been able to solve yet.

Internet Explorer 9 is perfectly able to dispay images.

[jaystarter]

Apologies. Bad day yesterday and frustration spills over to things unrelated