Maybe the server you are trying to download from has a bandwidth cap to keep things running at a constant rate for everyone and not let one person be a bandwidth hog.

Just to pop in here for a minute......!

My Broadband speed generally indicates 6.2 Mbps (Mega BITS per second), but it seems to have no relationship whatsoever to my "Download Speed" in Mbps, or the speed that the pages open on  the Sites that I browse. It all varies from Site to Site, and can sometimes be annoyingly slow, for no apparent reason!

...but it is all very much faster than my old "Dial Up"...thank goodness!... ....its just that it costs me a lot more money!... .....!

Paul...broadening my band... ...!

You're not going to get that speed... Ever.

I used to have DSL and I payed for 3 mbps and never got that... My download speeds were 300kb/s max. 6 mbps will get you 800kb/s max I believe.

Eventually I just moved on to cable

As Dave said, you're paying for megabit rates...

i have a 4Mbps plan at home, and i get up to 500KBps down speed (on a good server)... that's the top limit of what i'm paying for...

there are 8 bits in a byte, so 4Mbit is actually approximately 500Kbytes

it's evil, i know... the ISPs take advantage of the fact that 99% of the population doesn't know enough about computers to note the difference between bits and bytes... so it's selling something that you think is much greater than what you're actually paying for... and of course, they won't ever make an effort to clear up this confusion, as that would be bad for their business...

what annoys me most however, is the fact that, despite the Mbit/Mbyte debacle, the ISPs reserve the right to NOT serve you the contracted speed whenever they wish... they do this for the purpose of 'overbooking' their bandwidth... meaning sell more bandwidth than they can provide, based on the notion that not everyone is at peak usage all the time...

so, if for instance, the ISP has 10Gbps of bandwidth to offer, they will most likely sell out 30Gb... and regulate the speed each user gets based on the amount of usage at each given moment... so no one is actually getting what they pay for  

and this is actually stated in your contract... it usually says something about the ISP not commiting itself to serve you more than 10% of the advertised bandwidth... so there's really no way around this.. since every ISP adopts this practice

now, if you're constantly not getting your max download speed, considering the Bit/Byte difference, you should call your ISP and complain... they will usually increase your signal strength and it should improve a little... other than that, you can use a download accelerator, such as Orbit, that'll increase your speed by opening multiple connection with the download server (just keep in mind that some sites block accelerators, since it's bad for THEIR bandwidth)

Cheers

oh i hate you waspi lol.

Stuck on my 1.5Mb plan

In all my experiences, whether it be commercial dial-up orADSL, download speed has always been arpind 10% of upload speed.
When I was on 56Kb/s dial-up download speed was around 5.9Kb/s on the internet and at times as much as 8Kb/s on IRC. I currently have 4MB/s upload and the fastest download speed I've seen is 560Kb/s.

Mushroom_Farmer wrote on Mar 14^th, 2009 at 3:39pm:



that's exactly the bit/byte difference... you have a 56KB/s plan, and get around 5.6Kb/s of download speed (note that bits are abbreviated by a lowercase b, while bytes by a capital B)

the actual rate is more like 12.5%... but, usually there's other factors that also play into this mess

Cheers