maurice, I think you'll find that the downloads you've been getting are limited by the site you are downloading from.
I was recently down in bradford, taking advantage of a m8s 2mb line, and downloads on that varied from 6 or 7k per sec to well over a meg a second.
To test the speed, best site to try is the microsoft games website, try downloading one of their big game demos (170 meg or so), as microsoft have the biggest online capacity bar none, you should get it pretty fast.
Also, to see the speed difference in action, try pinging caithness.org from the command line and see how fast your connection really is.
win9x/me:
click start then run and type "command" in the box and hit ok, you'll get a command line window in which you should type "ping www.caithness.org"
win xp:
click start then run and type "cmd" in the box and hit ok, similar command line window opens, type "ping www.caithness.org"
after the site is pinged 4 times you will see a summary sheet similar to this:
Code:
Pinging www.caithness.org [212.100.226.101] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 212.100.226.101: bytes=32 time=50ms TTL=54
Reply from 212.100.226.101: bytes=32 time=92ms TTL=54
Reply from 212.100.226.101: bytes=32 time=51ms TTL=54
Reply from 212.100.226.101: bytes=32 time=50ms TTL=54
Ping statistics for 212.100.226.101:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 50ms, Maximum = 92ms, Average = 60ms
the final average is the time it takes to send a request to caithness.org and for the site to respond. The example above was on my 64k isdn connex. DSL connections should be about half what I get and modemers will get about 3-4 times the time delay.
This may not sound like a great deal of time, 60milliseconds is not a really long time, but when you realise what is being delayed by that time it starts to make a bit more sense...
You will hear website owners quoting hits all the time (we dont, you'll see why), 1 hit is actually 1 file request, eg this page (the post reply page) has about 30-35 files attached to the page, count up every image and every element that is not directly part of the page code. So that mean there were about 30-35 hits added to our counter when I visited this page. It also means that there were 30-35 file requests when i loaded this page. Your browser requests files in the order that they are presented to it within the html, so along with the actual download capacity of your connection you also have all these requests adding delays to the page loading, although these delays do not quite add up in a linear fashion, they do build up when your download capacity does not have the width to accept all the files at once.
Surfing through websites (on a nice fast host like us) is a completely different experience on broadband, our photo galleries are a good example. While down in bradford, I had the strange experience of actually looking at caithness.org for news and photos of what was going on while I was away (usually I'm only looking for tech issues and never read any of it ) and I have to say that browsing through the galleries was a joy, virtually instant loading of all the pages and photos, much more enjoyable.
I really feel sorry for those who are still using 56k modems, the whole internet must seem to be getting slower and slower as web sites upgrade their content to suit the phatter connections. We ourselves have held back on doing anything so outrageous as we know no one in Caithness, bar those of you looking in from the likes of Dounreay, has a broadband connection. We have people in the county ready to give us audio and video footage, and although this would be nice for our broadband visitors, the sizes of the downloads would completely remove any enjoyment from that type of content from our narrowband users. In anticipation of broadband finally coming to our area, we recently increased our website's capacity by over 300% so that we would be able to start handling files and downloads of the sizes required by audio/video.
So from our point of view, anyone offering land based dsl, or even possibly this wi-fi balloon idea, better be wearing a steel gauntlet when they make their offer as we're waiting with sharpened teeth to take their whole arm.
Just a quick addendum for those thinking about satellite broadband, the ping times are around 700-800 ms, more than 10 times slower than my isdn. This was shown by Colin when we attended the launch of the broadband for scotland campaign in inverness last year. How we laughed ?;o), the results were shown on their big projector screen for all to see. Even their satellite-broadband-test-subject had nothing good to say about it, how we laughed again ?;o)
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