OK, I wasn’t even going to ever mention this for the rest of my life for fear of sounding full of shit but my curiousity is really getting the better of me here.
Earlier tonight my brother called me over to his computer saying that he was getting incredible download speeds of well over 3.5 MegaBytes a second. Him being a computer novice I rolled my eyes and slowly walked over to his computer. As soon as I got there I immediately saw that what he was saying was indeed being shown on the screen and I promptly declared “Math error. That’s not possible.”
Well, a few moments later, after a total of about 2-3 from the start of the download, the 175MB file he was downloading was done. No file errors or anything. Crystal clear video with perfect sound.
So this leaves me with a real doozie of a question:
I’m aware that the modem is capable of 10MB/s and the CAT5 cable can carry 100Mb/s (12.5MB/s) if I’m not mistaken, but isn’t this normally hardcapped by the ISP? How could we possibly have achieved those speeds without ANY tweaking or tampering on our part?
FTR We’re on Cox high speed internet.
It could be that he has attempted to download the file previously but not completed the downl;oad; in some cases, Windows(I assume you’re using Windows) is able to pick up from where it left off - this usually causes the bit rate to spike dramatically, then fall off gradually and it can happen even in the absence of fancy download management software.
I thought of that for a brief second but he’s never attemped to download this files before - I can say that for sure because it’s a fairly new computer and he’s the only one that has ever touched it - and the software he was using doesn’t support download resumes anyway.
Download speeds are not necessarily capped by cable companies. The downstream bandwidth can simply be shared among all the users of a certain node. If, somehow, a failure caused a significant amount of users to lose their connection, it is not strange that the few users left got a much bigger slice of the pie: in your case, 3900KBps. What about your upstream speed? was it affected as well? How long did this “streak” last?
Another possibility is that your ISP is using active caching and someone happened to download that video before you. When you downloaded it, you actually got it directly from the internal network.
In any case, you are probably a runner for the world’s record fastest speed ever reached by a residential broadband user. Congratulations
PS: I’m curious what the straight dope is about this one. If your speed went back to normal, try contacting your ISP and asking them if they know what happened. Keep me posted.
On a similar vein, there’s also the possibility that his browser software performs something known as “link pre-fetching”, where it will automatically begin to download some or all of the links on a page as you’re viewing it. Perhaps the browser had already pre-downloaded most of the file by the time he actually clicked on the link, thus giving the appearance of a supernaturally fast download.
I think this is almost definitely the answer. Something similar happened to me once, a 40Mb file came down in about 1 minute, and that was the only explanation that made sense.
One is free to give Internet connection speeds in whatever semantically-appropriate units one pleases. Stating one’s download speed in nybbles per fortnight may be unusual, but certainly not incorrect.
Slight hijack, but I once experienced a similar phenomenon on a 56k dialup connection, which I do not believe should be possible. For a few seconds, my download was displaying speeds of over seven megabytes per second. Downloaded a 16Mb file in just over three seconds. Still have no clue how that happened.
With my cable (insight) all of the bandwidth testers say that I have 3.5 mbit downloads. However, I’ve never been able to get more than 400k a sec before. It’s nice being the only one in your city with a cable modem.
The cable modem I had in my apartment in Tokyo was 100 Mbps on the cable side (it was a “weekly” apartment and the high-speed connection was included), and 100BaseTX on the other. I never saw anything higher than about 6 Mbps, and usually around 2 Mbps.
Consumer high speed Internet access is nearly as ubiquitous in Tokyo as in Korea. Most cable and DSL services are over 10 Mbps (12 Mbps seems to be the most common offering right now).
400KB * 8 = 3.2Mb so you’re getting close. Try a major website that’s likely to have a good connection during off peak hours. I’ve noticed some of my fatest downloads ever have been from www.apple.com.
Well, color me impressed and having learned something.
All I’ve seen up her ein Canada is 10Base on both sides, and my connection’s usually quite capable of 4-7Mbits.
Thanks!
~Timban
That sounds like what Mangetout was talking about in his first post. I used to do that to mess with my friends. I would download like 99% of a huge file, then cancel it, then later resume it and it would show a download rate of something like 35MB/sec or whatever the case was.
Another way to do that in IE is to start to download something but not name it yet. After an ample amount of time, give the file a name and click Save and it will show a ridiculous download rate (don’t know if that still works, I haven’t used IE in a long time.)
