1mb how fast should it be

[jimmyb01]

My ISP tells me they have upgraded my connection to 1mb, I can't see any difference, When i do a speed test it shows between 850 and 950 kilos, this means nothing to me.  What should I be looking at for a 1MB adsl line.

[BillyNoMates]

Sounds about right to me - although it's been upgraded to a 1Mb line, in reality, because of the conditions I.e. length, quality of the cable to your house, you may not get the full 1Mb - so that's why a speed test may only show 850 to 950 Kbs (Kilobits). There are also other reasons which I won't go into.

K or Kilo = 1000.  M or Mega = 1,000,000 (one million)

The 1Mb (Megabit) refers to the volume of information which can be downloaded to your PC in a second. You were probably on a 512Kb (Kilobit) connection before = 512 thousand bits per second. Now you have 1MB (Megabit) = 1 million bits per second.

Think of it as a pipe. Before you had a pipe that could send 512 Kbits per second. Now you have a larger pipe which can send 1Mb per second so it's a wider or larger pipe.

I hope that helps - a fairly basic explanation which I hope does not offend. What you should or perhaps see is webpages loading more quickly, Emails being sent more quickly etc.

[mattie]

As already stated, you have to take into account the distance from the exchange and the quality of the cable supplying your house, also there is an network overhead which will take up some of your bandwith, this is for network session negotiation etc.

[Kev_UK]

The speed you are getting sounds reasonable. Have you tried early in the morning, with very few programs connected to the internet? You may find your speed could go higher than 1mb.  You can't be with tosscali as they tell lots of lies, if they tell you it's 1mb, it's probably a 56k dial up connection. (I've been waiting for well over a month to have tisclali remove their marker off my line so I can go elsewhere, they have not informed BT wholesale to take it off though they repeatedly tell me thay have.. OFCOM are involved now)