[clue-tech] Qwest DSL download speed reduced

[black at clapthreetimes.com]

Before everyone gets too twisted about their download speeds, please
remember that there are a lot of factors that affect this.

- Congestion at your provider
- Congestion where you're trying to get your stuff (very likely)
- Tremendously inflated marketing (show me 20+ mbps cable download speeds)

Qwest DSL offers 1.5mbps down at 640kbps up for most customers, last I
saw. You will probably not see your downloads go past around 1.2mbps. This
isn't because you're getting ripped off by 300kbps, it's because the other
300kbps is being consumed by framing and packet headers.

I dislike the speed test sites because folks are taking them too literal.
They are at most a "best guess" service. Here's an analogy - imagine if
you were an auto mechanic and one of your customers had Uncle Louie come
into town, take your car for a spin while he got some milk and then said
the car should run better. Armed with this "knowledge" the customer comes
back to you, the mechanic, and says you do lousy work.

Or another example, imagine you share your DSL line and your son is
downloading Half Life 2 while you, on another PC, run a speed test. The
results will not reflect your actual bandwidth at all.

Not to say they aren't useful, but you definitely have to take them with a
grain of salt.

And my side rant on cable providers is they advertise ridiculously high
download speeds, but customers don't see them - at least on any
sustainable basis. For both DSL and cable, you get what you pay for.

> erik at ezolan.com wrote:
>>> bof wrote:
>>> I don't know how accurate it is, but I look at the download speeds
>>> indicated when using wget or ncftp. Mine are usually around 1.48 kB/s.
>>
>> That sounds... very wrong. That would be slow even if you were using a
>> modem. That'll usually get you 4.8kB/s
>>
>> Did you try the speed test link posted earlier?
>
> Oops! decimal error: 148-155 kB/s is the number I've been getting today.
> Takes about 65-70 minutes to download a FC5 .iso file.
>
> BOF
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