Confused about internet speeds.

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alexdh01

alexdh01

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Mar 12, 2012
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I'm looking at switching my ISP for some more speed. When I test my internet speed at www.speedtest.net , I get 6/Mbps download and 0.6/Mbps upload. What do these numbers represent exactly? I sure as hell don't download files at 6/mbps. More like 600/kbps - 1/mbps. And I upload at about 60/kbps. Should I be getting better download/upload rates based on the numbers that test produced?
 
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These speeds are in BITS (lowcase 'b') per second, a very common speed measurement unit for serial links. You have to divide by 8 to get BYTES (capital 'B') per second. 6Mbps ~= 750KB/s.
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jcurry23

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Jun 10, 2011
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Ok first you have to under stand the difference in a Byte and a bit.

A bit is a single digit of information and a byte is 8 bits.

Internets speeds are always advertised in bits per second or (bps). Where as your computer tells you how many bytes per second you are downloading (Bps). (Little b means bits, Capital B means bytes)

so ADSL2+ is rated 24 Mbps which is 24 Mega bits per second. so to convert it back to bytes we need to divide it by 8. So ADSL 2+ has a theoretical limit of 3 Mega bytes per second. (or 3072 Kilo bytes per second)

But the actual speed you get is always going to be lower than the theoretical limit. So in your case you are getting 600 kilo bytes per second (KBps) which means you are getting about 0.6 of a mega byte a second out of a theoretically possible 3 mega bytes a second.

I hope that helps
 
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alexdh01

alexdh01

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Mar 12, 2012
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Can't believe I made that mistake! Thanks for the clarification.
 
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