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RobbyG666's avatar
RobbyG666
Joining in
4 months ago

Stupid question regarding Internet speeds....

Can someone help me understand the maths on this. 

I have the 500gbps package and speed tests show about and above this speed. 

I know that 1byte is 8bits and therefor I need 8bits person second to download 1byte per second. Therefore I would expect to be able to download 500gbits per second / 8 = 62.5gbytes per second. 

Why is a 20gbyte download taking 15mins and not 20seconds?

(device is right next to router, hard wired with cat7 cable, few other idling devices like my phone and Google hubs but nothing serious on.) 

 

Probably a very stupid question but I ask innocently to help understand. 

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  • RobbyG666's avatar
    RobbyG666
    Joining in
    4 months ago

    Correction 62.5gbps should download 20gb in about 0.3seconds if accurate. 

    • Client62's avatar
      Client62
      Alessandro Volta
      4 months ago


      The M500 package is advertised as max of 516 Mb/s downstream,
      so ( divide by 8 gives ) a max of 64.5 Megabytes per second.

      The best time for 20 Gigabytes transfer would a little over 5 minutes. 

      But to achieve that the server that is providing the file to download must permit you to operate constantly at 516 Mb/s and that is often not the case.

  • Graham_A's avatar
    Graham_A
    Very Insightful Person
    4 months ago

    VM don't have a 500 gbps package.  You are probably on the 500 Mbps tier.

  • Roger_Gooner's avatar
    Roger_Gooner
    Alessandro Volta
    4 months ago

    Not a stupid question. The M500 speed tier refers to bandwidth, i.e. the maximum capacity of a network connection to transfer data. Most people think - wrongly - that it's the same as speed. In this case 500 Mbps is VM's product offering of 516 Mbps (Megabits per second) download and 52 Mbps upload.

    You also have MBps (Megabytes per second) or MB/s - note the capital B. This refers to file transfer speeds in the context of file sizes and transfer rates for things like writing data to storage drives or downloading a game.