Downloading @ ~12Kbs

[Reddington]

Just last week I moved into my dorm room at college and connected to their network. After downloading and installing the mandatory McAfee antivirus software I could access the internet fine. I can play games online such as World of Warcraft as well as I could at home with a cable internet connection. I can surf the internet fine but some pages take a little longer to load then I'm used to. Video files on sites like YouTube take a while to load. The real problem comes when I try to download anything. I've tried to download files from Sun.com, Download.com, and Gamespot.com. When the Firefox download screen shows up it shows the file(s) being downloaded at a rate between 10-15 Kbs. I've always seen normal speeds from Download.com and Gamespot.com but now downloading a ~150Mb program takes 4+ hours!

I opened up the Network Connections page in Win Explorer and it shows my connection speed at 10Mbs. I've tried disabling and reconnecting with no effect. Is my computer bottlenecking the connection? I can't think of any other reason it would download so slowly if it has a 10Mbs connection.

 

[talldude123]

It says it's a 10MB/s connection because that's the maximum that the network card can recieve at a time.

Your network speed can be seen at:

http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest

 

[Reddington]

I ran the Speakeasy test.

Download Speed: 185 Kbs

Upload Speed: 182 Kbs

I guess I'll have to talk to the campus IT department to find out why my computer is downloading 10x slower than it should be. Rather than the 4 hour downloads I'm getting now they would only take ~24 minutes.

Thanks for the help TallDude

 

[beedubaya]

Well, some colleges don't have enough bandwidth to support the massive amount of students using it. Find out what kind of connection your school has to the Internet.

 

[Law]

Don't assume that. The speed of your network card has no justification towards your Internet speed, not yet though, unless you have a 10MB/s or 100/1000MB/s Internet connection speed. Most modern network adapter are rated at 100/1000MB/s, but this never applies to the Internet, since it would cost you thousands to get that kind of speed. This speed is only local on your network, where there is less restriction and less bottleneck.

I'm pretty sure your college has a faster speed than 10MB/s, but that doesn't really applied to just you. How many people can you imagine using that same connection, could be thousands, knowing that this is a college.

How's your gaming? Does it lag? I would assume that the college may have up some form of filtering on the HTTP service. Filtering = latency, latency = slow. Or they may be experiencing a lot of traffic on their internal services like a DNS server, proxy server. Network problem are big issues with large network. It's sometime harder to pin poin the problem. I'm pretty sure your IT department are already aware of the problem.

Check with some friends, see if they experienced the same problem. It might be many things.

 

[Reddington]

When I'm playing World of Warcraft it runs as fast as it did on my cable connection at home. The only difference I see is that every now and then while in a group my screen freezes for 4-5 secs and then runs fine again. I don't experience any lag I can see in Soldat, a simple 2D CS/Quake/Tribes hybrid game.

As for other problems...My roomate can't even get on the internet. In order to be allowed on the network you need to clean your computer of any p2p sharing programs, install an anti-virus program and get the latest windows updates. They have a series of programs to walk you through each step and he's tried 2-3 times but the network still won't work on his computer.

We're definately going to go to the campus IT department on Mon.