should i call my ISP and be a bitch? :P

What? Hold on I'll read that again... Nope, still WHAT?

There is no such thing as "INTERNET SPEED" versus "TRANSFER RATE". What you're probably referring to is bytes versus bits. You see computers work with 0s and 1s, all data is represented by these and they are known as bits. But just 0 and 1 isn't much information, so computers also work with bytes, these are 8 bits in a group, this means that you now have a larger range of information. Data is still largely represented in bytes, for example you might have a 700 megabyte film, but that could also be called a 5,600 megabit film.

So imagine for a second that you sell internet. Would you rather sell a 128 kilobyte connection or a 1024 kilobit? Yes, you'd rather sell the latter. Which also means that what you bought was a 3 megabyte connection but rather a 3 megabit connection which is 384 kilobytes per second. To understand why your speed is lower than this we need to understand something about how the internet works.

You see the internet uses a protocol called TCP to establish connections to the various servers on the internet. TCP connections have what is called an overhead, this is data used to create and maintain the connection which doesn't actually transfer the data you want.

To visualize this here is an image of the TCP handshake process:


That's just the connection part, though. When the TCP connection is created and data is being sent we need to make sure that the data sent is also being received. Which means that when you send a number of packages you also send a question "did you get that?", the remote server will then return "sure did mate!" and the transfer will continue.

As a rule of thumb this overhead is usually around 15%. Now what happens when we apply this 15% to the 384 kilobytes? Well 384 * 0.85 = 326,4! Imagine that, so close to your actual speed.

tl;dr: Your connection is fine and the people in this thread are stupid.

 

discretion is the better part of valour.

Seph is correct, you have a 3mbit connection therefore your maximum download speed is roughly 350kBytes per second.

 

they could explain why it would be lower than the maximum. He is getting what he is paying for.

 

connection speed is measured in bits, transfer rate is measured in bytes. 350kB/s is about right for a 3mbit connection. I'm guessing you're using adsl2+, which has a maximum speed of 24mbit/s, but the connection speed you actually get depends on how far you are from the DSLAM, which in the UK at least, is in your telephone exchange. 3mbit is about what you'd expect round about 3-4 miles from the DSLAM (note this is line length not straight line distance).

 

If you pay for 23mbit and you get 3mbit then yes, call and complain, there's no way you should be paying for a service they cannot provide.