Reohix Blog

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Internet Speed Test Help

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I have a 4 Megabit connection but I don’t download at speeds of 4 Megabytes per second. Why?

Keep in mind that the Internet service providers declare speed in bits per second. Suppose you have a DSL running at 512 kbps in downstream. The first thing to do is to divide that number by 8 so we transform kilobits (1000 bits) per second into 1000 bytes per second. After that we need to divide the obtained number by 1,024 because we are now talking about data storage. Therefore 1 kilobyte must be equal to 1024 bytes and not 1000 bytes as we have assumed for the transmission rate.

Calculations:

So 512 kbps / 8 = 64 Bytes
Then 64 Bits x 1000 = 64,000 bytes
Finally 64,000 bytes / 1,024 = 62,5 kB/s

Common Internet Speeds:

256 kbps = 31,3 KB/s
512 kbps = 62,5 KB/s
1 mbps = 122,1 KB/s
4 mbps = 500 KB/s
10 mbps = 1220,7 KB/s

Consider you want to download a file large 100 Megabytes. We know this is equal to 102400 kilobytes (100 x 1024), therefore if your Internet speed is 1 Mbps you will download at 122,1 KB/s, meaning it will take 14 minutes to download the file completely.

Our online test however measures your Internet download speed directly into kbps instead of KB/s as many download managers, p2p applications and web browsers do. This will avoid the need to make calculations in order to convert between our reported speeds and ones stated by your Internet Service Provider.

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Difference between download and upload speeds:

Downloading is the process of copying files to your computer from a remote location, for example from our server. This is when you load a webpage, view an image or download files from a server (across the Internet) to your computer.

Uploading on the other hand is the process of copying files from your computer to a remote location, for example to our servers. Also one should note that generally online communication and transfer applications such as chatting, VoIP and Gaming include both downloads and uploads transfers, so upload speed is not something that should be ignored.
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What is Throughput?

Throughput is the amount of data that can be transferred over your Internet Connection at a current point in time. It therefore is a good measure of the channel capacity of a communications link, and connections to the Internet are usually rated in terms of how many bits they pass per second (bit/s).

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Why do I sometimes get different results from the test?

The test shows the current Throughput you can get on your Internet connection. Keep in mind that factors such as network congestion (on weekends, download speeds tend to be lower, due to high network congestion), server load and other downloads and uploads that you currently have in progress will affect your current Throughput.

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I thought my Internet Connection was much faster?

As previously noted, the results of the Throughput test can be affected by any network congestion between you and our servers. If you have other downloads and uploads in progress this can also affect your Internet speed results. And sometimes even spyware and viruses are also common reasons for achieving lower speeds than expected.
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How does our Internet Speed Test know your current Throughput?

Our Internet Speed Test calculates the Throughput of your Internet connection by calculating the time it takes to download a predefined set of files from our servers, and uploading the same set of files that you downloaded back to our servers.