General Question about Servers

[rjwood]

I have Verizon-DSL. I had their 3mb/s plan but was only able to achieve about 370kb/s download when I would update. Besides checking email and surfing I don't do much more than update UBUNTU. I reasoned that since I was not getting anywhere near the 3mb/s dowload I would downgrade my service to 768kb/s for $15.00 less per month, a nice annual savings of $180.00..:)
So, since I have downgraded I am only achieving no-more than 100kb/s when I update. This seems suspicious to me. Verizon had me run a speed test and that showed my system receiving up to 684kb/s from their server to my computer. They of course blamed the outside server as well as any and all spyware and viruses. Their techs also analogized me to death with pipes, hoses, glasses, jars and water flow..

Perhaps I am way of base about this but, my suspision is that verizon has resticted what it's server is willing to accept from outside servers to my account. Thereby restricting what I am receiving from them while they can make the claim that I am receiving the proper service from them as revealed in the info speed test.

Am I making any sense?
Can some one clue me in on the way this works. If I am correct I am going to call verizon on it and get them to fix it.

[mjm115]

The way Internet speeds work is determined upon a lot of things. The 768k/s is a theoretical speed. I have a 1.5mb connection but I only get about 1.2 on a good day. It usually averages about 800k.

The speed can be slowed by how many people are online using verizon's connection, how many people are trying to connect to the same server you are connected to, and things like that. The closer the server, usually the faster it goes. 370k/b from a server that a lot of people access is actually pretty darn good.

[jazzmuzik]

3mb/s means three megaBITS, not three megaBYTES. 370 kiloBYTES per second is a good speed for an advertised 3 megaBITS per second speed. I generally divide the megabit speed by 1000 to get an estimate of the K speed, which generally indicates the thousands of characters being transmitted per second. So I would say you were above the advertised speed. Too bad you downgraded.

Um, if I recall correctly, Baud is a french term for bit, and modems have always been rated in bits rather than bytes. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong because I feel as if I'm making it up as I go. Fuzzy memory.

It has been suggested to use b for bits and B for bytes (I may have that reversed) anyway, it is confusing.

Also, there are 8 bits in a btye, but the reason I divide by 10 rather than 8 is because there is a certain amount of overhead in each packet, so I'm figuring a couple of bits extra for every byte. It's just an estimate.

[rjwood]

Thanks for the reply's. I guess I am thinking that I should be able to maintain the 370 with the768 plan. Why would it degrade so much? If I was able to acheive 370 with the first plan why not with the second??