Testing upload/download bandwidth speeds for verification

[Daniel B. Thurman]

Chris Tyler wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-08-14 at 08:29 -0700, Daniel B. Thurman wrote:
>   
>> I have been testing my residential ISP/DSL-Landline
>> connections and wanted to make sure that I was getting
>> what I am paying for. Supposedly, one can use the various
>> website based "speed test" tools to determine their upload
>> and download speeds.
>>
>> Are these "speed test" tools credible and can they
>> be trusted?
>>
>> Of the several sites I have tried, they all more or less
>> seemed to be in close agreement with one another in
>> terms of the bandwidth speeds, i.e. my connection
>> speed is quoted at 768KB/s up and 3MB/s down,
>> and the farther away from central, the more reduced
>> is the speeds are.
>>
>> The average speed tools says that I have measured
>> speeds of 720-30 KB/s up and 2.0-5MB/s down.
>>
>> Why is it however, that when downloading software
>> from the various Linux/M$ and other downloads sites
>> I am seeing on average, speeds of 200-320(max) KB/s
>> and never see anything much faster than that?
>>     
> Yes. 3 megaBITs per second is just over 300 kiloBYTEs per second. There
> are 8 bits per byte, plus there's packet and protocol overhead, so a
> 10:1 ratio between the numbers is normal.
>
>   
>> So, does that mean I am wasting money by going from
>> 768KB/s Up / 768KB/s Down to 768KB/s Up / 3MB/s
>> Down since I will never obtain download speeds faster
>> than the Upload limit of 768KB/s ???
>>     
>
> No, if you downgraded to 768 kilobit/sec service you would expect a
> maximum download speed of around 75-80 kilobytes per second.
>
> -Chris
>   
Duh-Oh.  That makes more sense.  I just posted a follow up before
receiving this message and I thought I "get it", but apparently I missed
the boat :P  Thanks for clarifying this!

Dan