Paying for 5megs only getting 500kb/s?

Question

i am really lost in this when you pay for 5mbps why do you only get half a meg...last time i checked a megabyte is 1000kb

what gives?

Answer 1

If you have cable you are not guaranteed what they say because the more people living in your area that get cable internet from the same provider as you cause it to go down. Only with DSL will you get the speed they state.

Answer 2

slow

Answer 3

Its 5 Megabits, not megabytes.

Answer 4

i dono its always like that but i think it converts it somehow what you can do is get a better eathernet card    and no itsnot magabits if it wer your internet browser wouldent work thatrs way 2 slow

Answer 5

isp's rip u off like that

Answer 6

phauxquota is right, but to expand on his point, there are several units you need to me aware of.

The first is the Megabit, which is 1 million bits. Connection speeds are usually measured in megabits per second, (or some times Gbps or Kbps too).

The next is the Megabyte, that's 1 million bytes, and is written as MB (note the uppercase B for byte). There is also a Mebibyte, which is 1048576 bytes, and the unit for that is MiB, this is what most software confusingly calls 1 MB.

Now, your connection speed is 5 Mbps, which is 5000000 bits per second. There are 8 bits in a byte though, so that is 625000 bytes per second.

That's a maximum of 625 KB/s (or 610.35 KiB/s). But that's a theoretical maximum. You also have to take into account the packet overhead used in the TCP/IP protocol, plus, you will never completely use all of the bandwidth your connection has.

So actually, a transfer speed of 500 KiB/s isn't all that bad, you're getting about one sixth of your maximum connection speed.

As an aside, here's a little rant. The Mebibyte is 1024 Kibibytes, and a Kibibyte is 1024 bytes. This distinction is very important when you get to sizes like 1.5 TB vs. 1.5 TiB (the current maximum HDD size). Users expect to get 1.5 TiB but they actually get 1.364 TiB, a difference of 139 GiB, or 9.95% less capacity than expected.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mebibyte

Answer 7

It's 5 Megabits, not 5 Megabytes. There are 8 bits in a byte, so your speed should be around 625 KB/sec. That's under optimal conditions, though, and the vast majority of people don't fall into the "optimal conditions" category, so your speed is pretty typical.