Am I getting the bandwidth I am paying for ?

I bought a I megabyte per second Internet connection from an ISP. Therefore, when I am downloading a 10 megabyte file online I expect to get it in 10 second. In practice it is not like that. what are the other factors militating against my download speed?

your TCP / application overhead is one of the factors.

Also window sizing of TCP.
TCP has the property to push as much bandwidth through your lines until it gets dropped. Then it halves down its speed and pushes again until it gets dropped.. this way you get an effective speed of 75% of your maximum bandwidth. Count in some jitter, delay, etc, etc..

Also notice most speeds are specified in Bits instead of Bytes. So a 10MBit link is actually 1.25 MByte/sec.

The other thing worth considering is how many other users are there in the local area using that "pipe". You might be facing contention issues.

sose wrote: I bought a I megabyte per second Internet connection from an ISP. Therefore, when I am downloading a 10 megabyte file online I expect to get it in 10 second. In practice it is not like that. what are the other factors militating against my download speed?

That's probably 1 Mega BITs per second, not 1 Mega BYTEs per second. To convert to Bytes, divide by 8. So thats 1/8 = 0.125 Mega Bytes per second. Thats your speed.

Rule of thumb:

If you see Mbps (the b is small letter), that means it bits. If you see MBps (the B is capital letter) that means it's bytes.

ISP speeds are usually advertised in Mbps. Tricky to catch I have to say.

Thanks solo, most are actually staed in Mb but yet they download speed will not correspond

You should be able to get a pretty clear result from a speed test site.

www.speedtest.net/