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It depends

67.164.165.165

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I have Comcast cable and normally get about 4000 kbits/sec = 500 kBytes/sec download speeds. About a week ago, I tried downloading a tonepubs issue, and the download dialog in my browser said I was getting only about 50 kBytes/sec, or about 1/10 of my capability. I tried the site again a few days later and was getting roughly the full 500 kBytes/sec, giving me a download of about 1:45 for the 48 MB issue.

In the path from your IP address to the IP address of the site you're downloading from, there's usually a whole bunch of routers, which can be seen with a traceroute utility. If just one of those routers is dropping packets, say from being overloaded or misconfigured, then the error correction of TCP/IP kicks in, and any lost packets must be re-transmitted. Now imagine some of these re-transmitted packets being lost also. You can see that this process can slow things down a whole lot, easily accounting for the 10x difference in speeds I was seeing.

Also, if a lot of people are downloading from the site at the same time, the server can't keep up with everybody's max download speed, so you'll see slowdowns. So there's lots of reasons why the actual download speed you see for a particular site may be far less than the capability of your cable internet service.

If you want to check your download speeds, go here and click on the "tools" link. Choose "speed tests". I usually use the one based on Sun Java. Pick the server nearest you. Make sure you have no other internet-related tasks going, in order to get the best approximation of your true speed.

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