Topic awaiting preservation: How is this possible?

I've often wondered how a dial-up modem connection can seemingly pull transfer rates over 5.6 k a second. Sometimes when I start a download the little download window in my browser will display a transfer rate well above 5.6 k per second, sometimes up to 20 k (even though I only ever manage to connect at around 4.6k), but this usually settles back to around 4 to 5 k within the first 30 seconds, which makes me thing the browser just didn't catch the first part of the download and that it interprets the transfer speed from a simple time elapsed divided by amount transferred process.

But recently, I've been getting impossibly high transfer rates when download files using Kazaa. I realise that downloading form multiple sources can often attain speeds higher than the connected rate, but this is usually only 1 or 2 k higher.

This, I simply can?t explain (note that I?m only download form one source per file):



And those rates have been sustained since I've connected; downloading 63 Mb in just over an hour:



When downloading via HTTP or FTP, the most I can manage in 4 hours (my connection resets or disconnects every 4 hours to discourage excessive downloading, asside form that it's unlimited and has no bandwidth caps) is about 50 Mb in that 4 hour period and that's on a good day. Suffice to say, I have absolutely no idea how this is happening, not that I'm complaining, but I'd still like to know how.

[This message has been edited by Cameron (edited 12-27-2003).]

a) you're right about browsers having issues timing the start of a download... especially IE I have known to do this
b) modems have a hardware compressing. If you're transfering well compressable data (text,bitmap), you can achive up to about 11kilobyte a second.
c) Those 56k in your modem are kilobit. They translate to 7 kilobyte maximum.
d) Guess what: Browsers mean kilobyte when they say kb. Kazza is talking about kilobits.

Mystery solved?

Tyberius Prime

Cam: My guess (because I've seen this too) is that when a download starts the code doesn't have enouh information to get a proper average on the download speed so it extrapolates from the information derived from the first few packets and assumes they are the average speed -if the first few packets go out at speeds in the upper range of your speed limit limit then its estimate will actually fall above the range of practical speeds.

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Emps

The Emperor dot org

Partially, but I'm still a little puzzled about downloading over 50 Mb in an hour?... I've never come close to anything like that before.

Based on the total of bytes sent and received, you need to share more your files.

hm.. 4352 seconds. 63186839 bytes (neglegting upload - the two directions are independant of each other to my knowledge)
That's 14519 bytes as second. hm


Someone's lying here.

Or... your modem is about to blow. I had a cheap modem that before it died, started getting high speeds. It was nice for a week or so, but then died. Maybe the governing circuits in your modem are faulting...

I wish there were 56k modem tweaks that bypassed the speed limits artificially imposed on modem users.

[edit] You should cut that horizontal pic in half... it's breaking the layout[/edit]
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Is this thing on?

A Work In Progress

[This message has been edited by UnknownComic (edited 12-27-2003).]

TP, that's why I posted this. It just doesn't add up. Alas, it hasn't repeated itself as I've since re-connected and I'm currently at 25 meg after 2 hours, which is about as good as it usually gets appart from that one odd occurance. I wonder if the files I'm downloading will actually work.