cox connectivity issue

[Kurt Granroth]

On Oct 7, 2005, at 3:14 PM, Dragos Neagu wrote:
> On 10/7/05, ec <eculbert at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> A 256k should give 25-28Kb, note the small and the
>> large K's. Theory has about 30+Kb. A knoppix d/l on a
>> 256k should be 8-9hrs estimated time on the 'download
>> manager' screen after a few minutes to smooth out.
>> 700Mb of stuff.
>>
>
> Make sure you are referring to the same thing, and be consistent.
> I'll have to concur with ec; telecom industry measures in Kilobits
> (Kbps) whereas most of your computer measures in Kilobytes (KB/s).
> There are 8 bits in 1 byte, so 256Kbps is the same as 32KB/s.

True enough... however, it should be said that the 32KB/s is the  
maximum theoretical rate of all of the data that goes over the wire.   
Every packet is going to have an ethernet header, though, so some of  
those bps are taken by those bytes.  And a few more are taken by the  
IP packets.  And if you're doing TCP (most Internet traffic, in other  
words), a few more bytes are taken.  Now packet size can vary and  
transfers with many small packets are worse than very large packets,  
but as a general rule of thumb, you should expect maybe 60-80% of the  
maximum in "real world use".

So, if you have a 256Kbps connection, then anything 19-25KBps should  
be good.  If you are getting significantly more than 25KBps, then the  
connection isn't really capped at 256Kbps.