Just a little info to help people understand the relationship between what your ISP tells you and what you should see in you BT client. Because you do not want your max speeds in the program to be faster than your connection can handle because this will slow your downloads down.

Now, BT programs monitor speed in kilobytes per second but your internet service provider will tell you your max download speed and upload speed in kilobits per second. Changing from to the other is easy you just divide the number of kilobits your connection can handle by 8 to give you the number of kilobytes it can take as 8bits=1byte.

Let’s say you have a fairly standard ADSL connection of 2mbit. A lot of people have this in their houses now and I consider it to be a normal working household connection in the UK. This means that you are able to download data at 2mbit or 2048kbits of data per second. When you got your information pack from your internet service provider it will have a maximum upload value. For 99% of the 2mbit connections I have seen it is 256kbits up but you may have 512kbits up if you are very lucky. Now it is highly unlikely that you will actually be able to use all 2048kbits down and 256kbit up. Most 256kbit systems have a real max of 244kbits per second so you have to take a little bit off just to be on the safe side.

So you take your max download of 2048 and divide by 8 to give you:

2048/8 = 256kilobytes per second down

And you do the same for your up connection so 256 divided by 8 to give you

256/8 = 32kilobytes per second up

Next you should take 5kilobytes per second off each way to account for the fact that that real speed never equals theoretical speed. This give you max global upload and downloads values of:

250kB/s down and 27kB/s up

Hope this helps.

thanks stevie very helpfull

I did not know this..thanks

hi stevi i have just got an upto 10mbit connection which means i can download at 1265KBS and up at 158KBS is this right or are my sums bad

of course this is without taking into effect time of day numbers online etc.

Theoretically speaking yes but you could never achieve that, it's not only other users, there's also line quality etc. From the point of view of torrents I'd only give between 75-80% of my max otherwise you'll kill your UL-DL speeds.

theoretically is right lol , i am seeding a movie and album both at 30KBS but i can still navigate the net i may try and see if i can push 50 each when the swarm grows.

i have installed the ff2 bandwidth tester posted by coma, its a pretty cool add on although it changes from 1 second to the next, personally i think if your buying a connection of "x" speed then thats what you should get 100% of the time

Its always a bone of contention with me that what the IP tells you and what you actually get get be wide of the mark. I've recently changed my IP because he was blocking P2P connections.

My current one is much better, dunno for how long.

Also another extra reason/addition to take into account when rating your max connection speed is the actual overheads of the actual IP packets of data that you are sending and receiving. Every bit of data that travels through your router or modem needs to have an extra byte of IP data to tell the host router how to deal with the packet of information that you are dl/ul'ing

Other factors that may play a part in the quality of your connection is your locality to your nearest Exchange (kind of like a base station) and if that base station is LLU or 'Un-bundled' as you all know ADSL is the primary platform in the UK is effected by distance any home further from the exchange than say 2 - 2.5 miles will not be able to get fast broadband (well that was the info I read up last)

:: Insight into Worldwide speeds in relation to UK DL & UL Speeds ::

atm, there is a local test for the next gen of broadband in Cardiff (Wales) where the newly developed bay area now has fiber-optic’s cable which will carry TCP/IP speeds of over 22 MB/s also known as ADSL2+ with an upstream of 10MB/s

As a note of comparison this is compared to half an OC-3 (45MB/s) connection of the same capacity if compared to the American Tiered Telephony network system. My figures may be a bit rusty so don’t quote me on that one. And just to put this all into comparison just as we "The Britt’s" break the 10MB mainstream DSL connection barrier the Japanese are running networks rating in GB/S (That's 1024 MB = 1GB ) using multiple fire lines which is based on the American Tiered system as mentioned above.

So all you IRC users who XDCC off the bots do a whois on their IP address and you will notice that the majority of the Bots are actually located in .jp and .kr (Korea) Net range of IP addresses

LOL

Thanks stevie, great post. Things make a bit more sense now, lol.

man my speed have increase dramatically after reading and setting it up, thanks for the info i thought i had my stuff together. little do i know thanks again

Thanks for that stevie, very useful and you already worked out what I should set mine at (On 2mb) so I didn't have to hurt my heads with some maths
Just changed my settings so will wait and see if it improves things.

Edit: Could be coincidence but my d/l speed on a torrent went from 20-30kb/s to 50-70kb/s nice one

thanks . you just done my head in

Cheer's Stevie i entered the required settings based on the info-links you submitted and you done me proud mate, my download / upload ratio's have increased dramatically. Thanks again mate.This is to the newbies (this is one site that you CAN count on).

thanks much, made it easier for me to see cus i knew what they were but my brain was going in circles x.X

maybe this is a stupid question, but pls be patient cause i am "greenhorn" and tell me :what about the ppl who use utorrent?

Thanks for the explanations, very useful.

yeah i knew about most of what you said and you put it down well and easy to understand.

props

Nice post Stevie very enlightening

Stevie,

thanks good explanation, easy to understand

movienut_4

Much appreciated Stevi.

I tried for like 20 mins to figure out how this worked the other day. Thanks for the answer.