Slow Download Speeds - A tenth of line speed?

[#1]

Hi,

After a recent BT visit (today, in fact) we were told that we should have been getting downloads of about 14MB per second, but we've only ever had about 1.4 MB per second. I've checked the router and it says it's getting 14, and I've checked network cards and they say up to 100MB per second, and the ethernet cables should be okay (an assumption), so what could it be?

The slower speed is common to every device in the house. Does anyone have any ideas?

Oliver B.

[#2]

An ADSL sync speed of 14Mb/s is perfectly likely - but note that is a lowercase "b" for "bit".
Serial line speeds are traditionally given in bits/second, "b/s"
Computers transferring data traditionally give speeds in Bytes/second, uppercase "B" for "Byte" - "B/s"
There are 8 bits in 1 Byte, so mathematically converting the units is just dividing by 8, but with layered protocol overheads etc, it more likely for real life speeds to be divided by 9 or 10 (which is easier too!).

What speed test gave you the 1.4MB/s figure - its possible it really did mean an uppercase "B" for "Byte".

Similarly, your network card will be showing 100Mb/s rather than 100MB/s.

So an ADSL raw line sync speed of 14 Mbit/s could typically give a userland IP speed of 1.4 MByte/s.
That said, most online speed test sites normally use bits/second in the results.

[#3]

So it could easily have been a miscommunication? I guess that makes sense. The Engineeer did look scandalised when I said we only got 1.5 megabytes per second, but maybe he wasn't listening.

I haven't used any speed test that disagrees with your hypothesis and the router measures in bits, so I suppose this is fixed.

Thank you!