Why is it when I check on speed test I get like 100 mbps but when I download something I only get 10 mbps??
In: Technology
Think of bandwidth on the internet as a hose.
Each hop (connection between two points on the internet) is connected by a hose, but each hose has a different width. The band**width** is how wide the hose is. The wider the hose, the more data you can push through it per second.
Your connection to a server will only run as fast as the smallest pipe along the route. So if the slowest part of the path is 10mb/s, the fastest connection you can make to that server will be 10mb/s.
While your measured or advertised internet speed is just the speed of the hose from your house to the ISP.
Websites also often throttle individual connections, preventing a single user from using up more than 10mb/s or similar. They do this so a single person can’t eat up all the bandwidth of the site to download a file, you have to share with everyone else
They are 2 different measurements. A broadband connections is measured in megabits per second and a download on your computer in megabytes per second.
8 megabits = 1 megabyte.
>Why is it when I check on speed test I get like 100 mbps but when I download something I only get 10 mbps??
How quickly you can download something is not only bottle-necked by your downstream, it’s also bottle-necked by the upstream of whatever server or download repository you are using. If the server cannot or is not willing to allocate more than 10Mb/s (watch the capitalization!) of his upstream bandwidth to you then that’s what you’re going to get.
If you’re paying for 100 megaBITS, then the fastest you’ll ever see something downloading is 12.5 megaBYTES. Internet speed is measured in bits, but everything you see when downloading files is measured in bytes. 8 bits = 1 byte, so divide your internet speed by 8 to get a number that matches all of the others you see when you’re transferring files.
Then you could ask why are you not always seeing 12.5 megabytes per second on the transfer speed when you’re downloading something if you have 100 megabit internet?
1. You’re doing other things that are eating bandwidth
2. The source you’re downloading the file from has a data transfer cap
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