The times they are a-changin’.
This post seems to be older than 3 years—a long time on the internet. It might be outdated.
Can anyone explain why, when my internet download speed is testing around 20mbps, if I go to download a file, the actual speed result is more like 1-2mbps?
There’s a couple things going on, but first a primer on the internet:
For our purposes, think of the internet as several independent networks that are joined together through interconnection points. for our sake, let’s assume that each independent network is a physically restricted to a city; so there’s a Seattle Network and a Denver Network and a Minneapolis Network, etc.
Also, each network is only connected to its closest *major* city. So, Seattle and Denver don’t actually connect to each other but instead both connect to the Salt Lake City Network…this called a hop and it takes two hops to get from the core of the Seattle Network to the core of the Denver Network (Hop 1: Core Seattle -> Core SLC; Hop 2: Core SLC -> Core Denver).
There are also other ways the Seattle Network could connect to the Denver Network…it could go down the west coast and then back up, but that would take more hops (through Portland, San Fran, LA, etc). Each hop takes time so there’s benefit to keeping the number of hops as low as possible. Also, the connections between any two cities are not infinitely big, but some are bigger than others.
Web servers are located throughout the world, but generally congregate near large cities since they offer the best chance of serving the most people with the fewest hops. If a web site has customers in many different cities they will probably have web servers in each of those cities to try to reduce the number of hops each visitor has to make to get to their server.
As a general internet user you and I are on the outer fringes of one of these networks. If I want to connect to a server in a different city, I first must get to the core of my network before I can transit across other city Networks to get to my destination. This could take several hops just within my city to get to the core of Seattle and then several more hops to get to a different city if it’s not physically located nearby and potentially even more hops if the server I want isn’t near a large city.
Okay that’s the primary and hopefully that makes sense. To answer your specific question:
When you do a speed test, you are generally checking it against a that’s run by your own ISP. If you look at Speedtest, you have an option to pick a server and you can see that there are servers run by Frontier, AT&T, CenturyLink, Comcast, Sprint, and whole bunch of other internet service providers. What you are testing is the connection between you and *near* the core of your city network. It probably takes about 6-10 hops. This is also the part of the network that is generally underutilized the most (which is also why ISPs also oversubscribe and you get the dreaded 7pm slowdown when everyone is binging Netflix). This is rarely representative of real-world situations.
When you go to download your file, it’s probably hosted across the country and has to make 20+ hops. Any one of those hops may be subject to limits for all sorts of reasons that ultimately result in a slower download speed.
If you want a true test of your download speeds, you need to check it using a site that better represents a real-world situation. I’d suggest trying http://speedtest.fremont.linode.com/ and see how that compares.
If you’re interested I can go waaaay more in depth too and we can even look at exactly what routes your data is taking (it’s actually really fascinating) and maybe even figure out where the bottle neck is happening (though it will be tough, but not impossible, to do anything about it).
0