At the moment I have a 50 megs symmetrical unlimited internet plan, but no matter the device or connection method (5G, LAN) my download/upload speed never exceeds 5 megabytes even though the speed tests always show 50/50.

Is it possible that my ISP is limiting this speed per device so that a single device does not hold all the bandwidth?

And what does this have to do with piracy? Well, between downloading files at 5mbs vs 50mbs there is a lot of difference, especially a lot of torrents.

  • Yetanaika@feddit.clEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    Normally, at least in my country, ISPs sells you plans for X Megabits, not Megabytes. So, if the contract says 50/50 Megabits, your downloading speed would be 50÷8=6.25 Megabytes max.

    Sites like speedtest.net also shows you your speed in megabits

  • D4NM3D@reddthat.comEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    your connection is 50 megaBITS not megaBYTES… so divide 50 by 8 and you’ll get your answer…

    50 / 8 = 6.25

    Now take in to account the overheads… the speed you’re seeing is completely accurate.

    If you wanted to download at 50 MegaBYTES as you insinuated then the same math applies…

    50 * 8 = 400

    So you’d need to pay for a 400 to 500 Megabit connection.

    I have a 900 / 110 connection and my actual MegaByte speeds are 90 / 10

    You may feel hard done by, but this has always been the way… as far as I know every ISP in the world markets in Mb (MegaBit) not MB (MegaByte)

  • ThatGuy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I have much better speeds (1GB) and I dont think Ive ever got past 10mbs when torrenting. It can only go as fast as the seeds can upload to you. (So if they are sending at 5mbs, you will be bottlenecked by that upload speed)

  • zurohki@lemmy.fmhy.mlEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Network data rates are usually measured in bits while the size of data is measured in bytes.

    Probably for historical reasons. Bytes weren’t always exactly 8 bits, so the number of bytes you’d get through a modem in one second varied depending on what byte size / character encoding you were using.

    You’re complaining about getting 5 instead of 50, but if you’re actually getting 50 megabits then that would deliver around 6 megabytes per second. Add some TCP overhead and that would mean your results are exactly in line with misreading the units.