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General discussion

What can I do about slow download speeds???

Jul 9, 2009 2:44PM PDT

I have Verizon DSL and my download speeds are nowhere near what is advertised. My last speed test showed a download speed of 740 kbps and an upload speed of 120 kbps. This was described as "90% worse than typical Verizon service". Is there anything I can do at my end? Verizon's slowest advertised speed is 1 mbps. I'm using Windows XP and my modem is Westell model E90-610015-06.

Discussion is locked

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If you read the fine print . . .
Jul 9, 2009 9:42PM PDT

there's a statement like "Advertised speeds are not guaranteed". What did they tell you for your area? DSL is distance limited and the farther you are from their facilities, the speed drops. It's just the physics of the telephone cable pair.

This is the same reason that data transfer across a LAN running at 100 Mb/s will not actually transfer at that speed. It's all advertising hype.

Have you called them and complained? Sometimes there are faults on the cable pair that can be repaired. But not until you complain and they test the line.

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Broadband connection
Sep 24, 2009 10:16PM PDT

How can i translate a download speed of 5.68kbps (attachment) to the actual asign bandwith of upto 512kbps? kindly note that when i run speed test my achievable speed is 448kbps download and 157kbps upload averagely.

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Re: download speed
Sep 24, 2009 10:26PM PDT

5.68 is less than 512, that's sure. But most download speeds are measured in bytes, not in bits, so that makes 43.5. But that's still much less than 512.

Maybe there is bottleneck at the source you download from, or in the connection between that source or your ISP? The only problem: you can't measure that.

Kees

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Broadband
Sep 24, 2009 10:57PM PDT

Thanks Kees, i can actually see some sense on the bottleneck. I am in Kenya and what am downloading is in local servers, so when is use microsoft outlook connected trough proxy it is faster, but when i use web accesss i.e internet explorer for instance it is very slow. Or am i wrong?

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My neighbor had that issue.
Jul 9, 2009 11:49PM PDT

Now you didn't tell if you ran TORRENTS which we all know is a no-man's land for speed and you can't use that for your complaint. But my neighbor had that issue for a year. Finally I changed and had a spare DSL modem which I swapped with his. Bingo, great speed. Since the modem was theirs all he needed to do was speed 3 hours on the phone to get them to test it and swap out the modem.
Bob

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Exchange Server
Jul 12, 2009 11:58PM PDT

ASk your ISP how far away you are from the exchange server, they can allways tell but they won't tell you when you're signing up.