Downloading faster than I should????

One idea is that people frequently confuse, or don't realize, the difference in KB/Sec and Kb/Sec.

Wow - how much?
After we buy into that - maybe we can purchase that nice cheap swampland lot in Florida...
:D

You may get better compression on some sites than others - but you won't get that extreme difference with any application.  I'd say they're either fudging the terminology (Mbit vs Mbyte, or Kbit vs KByte)  or bumping the numbers somehow - don't believe it...

As for the other apps - they may have limiters in place to prevent you from getting anything over 150k...this is to allow similar bandwidth to other users, so no one user (or group) hogs the pipeline...

Doh! See - great minds think alike... :D

I just so happen to have a 10Mb Ethernet Internet feed at my desk waiting for an installation window so we can incorporate it into our main Internet Edge Connections.  It was already active, and the company is paying for it, so we (Networking) figured "Hey, this is hot and working - while no one is using it, we will!" Heh heh heh ...

So anyway - I wanted to put it through it's paces and do all these broadband tests and do screen captures and say "look at this!" right?  Well, as it turns out, it NEVER goes above ~ 2Mbps ... because all the Broadband tests on the other end are TOO SLOW!!! :)

Here's a quickie spreadsheet:

Kbytes/sec      300
Bytes/sec      307200
Bits/sec      2457600
kbits/sec      2457.6
mbits/sec      2.4576

So, if one day you got 300KBps and the next time you looked you had around 2.4Mbps ... you were getting the same throughput.

Different programs can use different mechanisms for file transfers.  For instance, if you use HTTP to transfer a file it's MUCH slower than FTP.

HTH

I doubt that it's displaying in Kbits/second, because it's a free program, so I don't know why they'd want to do that, and secondly, the speed at which it says it's downloading reconciles with the time it takes to download the songs.  more than ten songs in one minute is fast no matter how you count it.  also, I noticed that it uses the udp protocol, but don't know enough to know if this makes any difference...

if anyone's in to downloading music, the program can be found on www.blubster.com,  although the one on this site is a newer version than the one I'm currently using.

UDP (User Datagram Protocol) is a "connectionless" protocol - meaning the sender just sends and their side does not worry if you got it or not.  It's up to the program to make sure you got everything and reassemble the packets in the right order.  Therefore, it's faster than TCP (Tranmission Control Protocol).  For file transfers - FTP and HTTP use TCP.  TFTP uses UDP.  Odds are, the app may be using TFTP to actually transfer the file.