Is this d/l Speed correct?

peterflln

Hello,I've just got broadband from eircom and it's the home plus package which offers download speeds of 2mb.the fastest speed download i have recieved is 213Kb/s.This maybe a stupid question but is this correct?

thebman

Are you sure that shouldn't be a capital B. They mean two very different speeds, one being dire and the other good or reasonable at least.

Do most pages load in under 10 seconds would be an indication that you meant a capital B.

b= bits, 8 bits in a byte
B= bytes, 1024bytes in 1 MB

from Yahoo answers page:

When they say 2mb broadband, they mean 2 megabits per second. This translates to about 256 kilobytes per second.

So you should be getting 256KB/s but with contention presumably or some other issue it is 213KB/s which is still pretty good I think although I'm no expert on if it is good or not but its better than a lot of people in Ireland.

Its not a stupid question though. Some of the people I know with degrees in Computer Science ask this question even though they should know.

greglo23

try the test here. http://www.irishisptest.com/
it will give a graphic of your speed.

JNive

2mbps conenction will get you about 230KB/sec tops from most european sites.

2mbps = 2 megabits per second. there are 8 bits in a byte, therefore its equal to .256 mega bytes per second = 256 KB/sec, minus some netowrking overhead equals you 230KB/sec , which is about a megabyte every 4 seconds, or an average song in about 15-20 seconds

skyhighflyer

b= bits, 8 bits in a byte
B= bytes, 1024bytes in 1 MB

Shouldnt that be 1024KB in a MB?

peterflln

Ya,should be a capital B.I guess my d/l speed is reasonable after all.Thanks for your time and help.

Esel

In referring to speeds of telecommunication, AFAIK K = 1,000; M = 1,000,000. not 1024 and 1046576 as most people assume.

JNive

as far as im aware, K=1000 is used only in storage systems.
My 3mbps service from eircom was conencted at 3072kbps (3145728 bits / sec ) when i had it.

watty

Traditionally 1024 x 1024 x 1024 etc applies only to memory, which since it uses direct binary addressing can't have storage of 1,000,000 but has to have 1024 x 1024

two to power 10 = 1024= 10 address wires

In reality K and M should never be 1024 based. a new set of units and names was proposed some while ago to end the confusion started by memory chip makers.

JNive

it applies to data also, just not devices. ( a 4MB file = 4096KBytes )

Anyways, in general, when talking about anything in bits and bytes, assume its 2^10 (1024) and not 1000, except device storage capacities