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General discussion

How is this possible?!!

May 6, 2005 6:08AM PDT

I use a free dial-up service, and I usually get download speeds of 3-5 kb/s when getting anything off the web. However, every once in a while, usually with small files - I get outrageous speeds. For example, today, I was downloading a Mathematica notebook from MathWorld (about 500 kb), and I was getting speeds of 15-25 kb/s. (Thats kiloBYTES, not kiloBITS.) I checked the Win XP dial-up connection status, and it was true - there was a jump that big in the number of thousands of bytes received - every second.
This has happened on several occasions, but only from some servers (Yahoo email sometimes does this), and always when I was using Firefox for the download.

Is this even *physically* possible on a dial-up connection? Is there any way to make this happen more consistently?

Discussion is locked

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Re: How is this possible?!!
May 6, 2005 10:22PM PDT

Consider yourself lucky. Also don't advertise it to anyone. Its probably a fault with the ISP and they would certainly throttle it back if they were aware of it.

And yes its possible with some small downloads once in a while and if it happens to be a relatively quiet day on your ISP's servers.

I certainly wouldn't mention it to your ISP. And NO its not possible to do it consistently. Its just one of those things that happens sometimes.

Your ISP may also still be in the process of fine tuning everything so your lightning downloads may or may not continue for much longer but on the net you never know...........Enjoy it while it lasts.

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Reporting algorithm
May 7, 2005 11:27PM PDT

If you ever noticed that when you first start to download something the first few (2-5) seconds the download rate is reported as very high, well the reason for this is data is sent in packets (chunks) so the first reading is erroneous as the reading is taken the second the packet arrives - to smooth out the graph I assume a bit of averaging occurs - so you end up with the same sort of graph that would occur with a cumulative average curve.
To compound to this, these packets (or MTU size) can vary depending on your internet settings - files can also be split into parts and sent as other process using different band widths thereby minimising handshake times. The web site and your server also influences how much time sharing they afford you - with smaller file sizes they may give you more time share.
Theoretically the phone line should not be much slower than the speed of light - it is only line resistance and electromagnetic interference that causes the problems and the limitations of modems and software, be it filtering or data compression.
All the above can come together for a few seconds or minutes and you are travelling at the speed of light!!!!
Another good site is microsoft and perhaps Symentec - I've always found them to be fast.
Regards,
Peter

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(NT) Sorry snharden, I meant to post in a different thread!
May 7, 2005 11:31PM PDT