Downloading at speed of 30KB/s on dial up!

Question

Level 1

5 points

Downloading at speed of 30KB/s on dial up!

I have a dial up internet connection and i normally get speeds of 4KB/s or 5KB/s and that is normaly the speed of my downloadds would go, but today when i started my downlaod it was doenloadding at a speed of 30KB/s to 40KB/s (WOW) i was suprised that dial up could even go that fast and it kept at that speed for 11MB and then it slowed to 10KB/s and then back to 5KB/s )-: and the rest of my 19MB downlaod was finished at my old slow speed. (in 5 minutes i downloaded 11MBs)

Now i was wondering why and how it could go so fast for so long?
and if there is any why to keep it going that fast?

(i have had this speed (30KB/s) before but they only lasted a few seconds and each time i was either in "Acquisition" (a type of lime wire program) or using apples built in updater to update my mac)

G4 iMac, Mac OS X (10.4.8), 1GM RAM, 800Mhz, **great compputer, never freezes unlike windows(-:**

Posted on Jan 25, 2007 3:04 PM

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Answer 1

Taylor L.

Level 3

515 points

Jan 25, 2007 3:08 PM in response to sleeth

Hi Adriel,

Download speeds depend on a number of factors including bandwidth allocated by the server (in cases like Apple Updates), number of simultaneous download locations (for things like torrents or peer downloads), and speed of those connections (56k vs Cable, etc.).

It's possible you just got a temporary favourable combination and then that peer left, or didn't have the sections of the file you were trying to download. Sustaining high download speeds on dial-up can be very difficult.

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Answer 2

BDAqua

Level 10

250,259 points

Jan 25, 2007 3:31 PM in response to sleeth

There's also to consider... Hardware Compression in the Modems, where big expanses of like Text and stuff will get compessed on the fly, (like 11KB of TEXT, or 30KB of SPACES gets squeezed to 5KB of bits to transfer), then the other end decompesses it, and it looks like you recv'd 30KB in one second, when in actuality you recv'd 5KB in one second. 🙂

I think if you examined that download in something like HexEdit, you'd see a lot of repetition/blank space in the first 11MB, and little in the remainder.

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Answer 3

sleeth Author

Level 1

5 points

Jan 25, 2007 3:42 PM in response to BDAqua

HAH, what do you know it is what you sad.
I had a look in HexEdit and just over half of it is all "0" and then on the other half there's heaps of writing.

)-: disappointing for me to find out that it was just the file and not the speed of my modem )-:
Oh well, thanks any way for solving my mysterious 30KB/s.

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