i have dsl with speeds of 1536 / 896 Kbps. I can only get around 165 kb download speed and 85kb upload speed. Is this normal? Is there any way to increase the speed? My service provider told me to take 1536 and 896 and divide them by 8 to get the actual speeds. What's the logic in dividing it by 8?

8 bits in a Byte.

Connection speeds are measured in bits, down/upload speeds are measured in Bytes.

yeh you misunderstood. the difference in kilobit's and kilobytes.

1536 kbps = 1228kbs

kbps = bits

kbs = bytes.

i think. im a dumbass

Ok. Download speeds are shown in Kb/s, while in your browser, the download speeds are shown in KB/s. b=bit B=byte. there are 8 bits in a byte. I have a 2Mb/s connection. Thats 2048Kb/s. Divide that by 8 and you get 256KB/s.

Hope you could understand that

He probably won't understand unless hes taken Data Mathematics in College.

ok i get it now, thanks for your replies. So is there a way to get a higher speed, because sometimes it jumps to like 200kb and i've even had it go to 298 once

It's rated limited at the ISP end of things...

I was downloading some huge files from UCR (to UCLA) and got a download speed ~= 1800kB/s. Universities have awesome networks.

My connection says 100 mbps.Is that a good speed?

that's just your local connection. My university has a local connection of 1gbps. But the speeds to download off the web are around 300-500kbps. I can get speeds of 5-10mbps when i'm downloading from the school sites.

I did a speed test @ college and it only showed as 2.8mbps or mabey there allocating that much ot each comp or thier runnin the whole thing off of 2x t1 lines.