Throughput, download speed, bandwidth, or something else -- which of these am I trying to say? I can download a huge file, topping speeds of around 140 KB/s. Is 140 KB/s my maximum download speed? And isn't that speed the same for all information I can receive, or just file transfers? [more inside]
posted by Quarter Pincher on Jun 4, 2009 - 16 answers

Our office is setting up a satellite office in Hong Kong. We've always had trouble sending our large 5GB files to Asia. But our office in HK with have a 100Mb internet connection. We have a DS3 in San Francisco. We'll be using a proprietary third-party app to do the heavy lifting. Realistically, what does the hive-mind think we will experience in transfer speeds?
posted by roderashe on Dec 4, 2007 - 6 answers

Some web pages with a lot of text seem to load slowly, even over broadband, and especially when compared to the bandwidth streaming video uses, I don't understand why. Can somebody explain? (Warning: Those links load slowly.)
posted by cgc373 on Nov 25, 2007 - 14 answers

Help me understand bandwidth, servers and net speed in general please! [more inside]
posted by fightorflight on Apr 11, 2007 - 17 answers

I work in an office with several not-for-profits share a high speed internet connection. My internet connection on my Mac Book seemed slow, so I tried the online test at Speakeasy. (I disabled the Airport connection so that I could test Ethernet) I ran the test several times and always found I had around a 400 K connection. Wireless, same test, circa 150 K. So I asked my collegue to run the same test from his Dell desktop---he got almost 1200K across several tests. I thought maybe it was the jack in my office, so I tried yanking out the plug and trying it in my collegue's office with another Dell desktop--she got 1200k--I got 400. I thought it might have been the MBP, so I dug out a Dell laptop--guess what--the most it would get in any office location was 400K. Same for a Mac mini that's on the same network. Now here's the thing--if I take that same MBP laptop home I get 3000K over my cable modem. Why would some computers get higher throughputs than others? They have an outside vendor administer the network and they seem to have disabled ping and traceroute. I started to wonder if maybe they limit bandwidth to the IP address, but all I really do during the day is work in Basecamp and reply to emails with an occassional look at Bloglines. Any ideas for the MeFi community about why this might happen and how I can intelligently describe the problem to the network admin so it doesn't sound like I'm nuts?
posted by teddyb109 on Mar 14, 2006 - 4 answers