Not getting the Internet speed I am paying for.

dwarren95

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Aug 13, 2011
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Hello everyone, I am curious as to whether why I am not getting the Internet speed that I am paying for. I live in a little town of a 100 people in rural Missouri and the fastest we can get is DSL from AT&T. We are supposed to be getting 6 megabytes a second and I am looking at my network meter gadget and it says I am only getting 678kB/s. I mean, do I have a bottleneck somewhere? (I can tell because I am downloading updates...) Any help is appreciated.
 

nexere

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Jul 21, 2010
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You mean 6 megabits i think, which is an 8th of a megabyte. (there is 8 bits to a byte)
so 678kBp/s(kilobytes) x8 = 5424kbps (kilobits)
so 5424kbps out of a possable 6000kbps/6megabits (download very rarely max out a connection and needs some of your connection for overhead)
so you are getting the full 6 megabits more of less.

So think yourself lucky i can only get 1megabit no matter how much i pay where i live :(
 

vibrantxxninjas

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Apr 14, 2011
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yes megabits vs megabytes had me a little confused at first too and i thought it was just a typo or something at first :p so i had to do research myself because i thought i was getting a killer deal on my own internet also.. but yes nexer is absolutely correct
 
I wish companies would advertise the standard for denoting transfer speeds on their websites. A quick footnote saying:

Mbps = Megabits per second
MBps = Megabytes per second

... would be nice! Customers would have a better idea (or at least not feel like they are getting cheated or less than what they are paying for) of what is being delivered.