Hi Paz....
12-15kbs.....I wish....LOL...!
Mine varies between 4.8, (the highest), to around 2.4 if I am very lucky.... ...!
...1.2 is very common.... ...!

I use the Go!Zilla downloader which illustrates the download speed with a coloured graph.
It also shows the download progress with a coloured graph.
If everything is in glorious Technicolor then I know that something is happening, and I just have to lie down for an hour or so until the download is complete...Woo Hoo...!

A great deal of patience is definatly required.... 8)...!

Cheers mate... ...!
Paul.
(England)

P.S. 56k dial-up, using a Diamond Supra-Express 56i Pro Modem.....(a pretty good one)... ...!

P.P.S. ...perhaps this is what we need.....

<New internet link downloads films in seconds.....
An internet connection so fast it will allow whole movies to be downloaded in just five seconds could soon be a reality.

Scientists in the US have developed a system called Fast TCP that promises to be 6,000 times faster than today's broadband links.

A key feature of Fast TCP is that it could run on the normal Internet infrastructure.

The new system was developed by Steven Low and a team at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena.

New Scientist magazine said Low compared the way the internet works now to driving a car while looking only 10 metres ahead.

"This is OK for driving slowly in a parking lot," he said. On the open road it was necessary to look further."

The first practical test of Fast TCP sent data 10,000 kilometres from Sunnyvale, California, to the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva.

The average transmission rate was 925 megabits per second, compared with 266 megabits for ordinary TCP.

"By ganging 10 Fast TCP systems together, the researchers have achieved transmission speeds of over 8.6 gigabits per second, which is more than 6,000 times the capacity of ordinary broadband links," said New Scientist.

Caltech is said to be in talks with Microsoft and Disney about using Fast TCP for video on demand.>
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Courtesy of Ananova and  http://www.freeserve.co.uk

It depoends largely on your ISP. I have around 15 ISP's & they vary hugely. The worst by far are the well known big names. The smaller independants are usually the best. It all depends on how many people are using the various hardware at one time.

Try to get an internet magazine that gives performance figures for ISP's - ideally monthly & get yourself a good ISP.

anything less than 3kbps is unacceptable. Ditch them. You should get around 4-5  kps download speed on a 56k modem.



p.s. The reason transfer rate appears to drop is because  Windows tries to calculate download speed. It takes time to settle to an accurate reading. It never is really 12kps on your modem  - that's just the (inaccurate) reading at the beginning....

4-5 kbps!

I live in an area where the phonesystems are really old which only lets me have a connection of 26.4kbps at the max. My download speeds average between 1.5 - 2.2 kbps.

Consider yourself lucky!

There are a few free ISPs here in America, but they're going out of business everywhere. I used to even use one that didn't have banneradds or even a required dialer, but that was over in Washington