My friend and i both have cable connections through same provider and are machines are comparable, yet what takes me 20 min to download takes him 1min. I recently upgraded from a 56k and the download speed is very much the same maybe as high as 10 or 12 kb/s. I am down loading from other cable modems. Any ideas why so slow?

Thanx Don

Becuase the files you are downloading are coming from slow or heavily loaded clients and/or they are sufficiently rare that LimeWire can't find multiple sources to download from.

Probably.

Mark

Another reason is that those "cable" hosts may be 56K with delusions of grandeur. I have had downloads from supposedly T3 hosts that stayed around 1-2 K/sec. for the entire course of the download. Chances are, they are fudging their prefs. Well, so do I. I have DSL, but if I want to take full advantage of my bandwidth and connect occasionally to more than six untrapeers, then I have to put T1 in the preferences. I have no idea what T1 is; we don't have it here, but I can tell from the IP's that most of the folks around here do the same.

Just for the record T1 and T3 are telephony designations for a type of data circuit provisioning. (in Fiber they are DS-1 and DS-3) These are generally used by organizations as opposed to home users.

- A T-1 has a speed of appx 1.5 megabits per second (Mbps)
- A T-3 has a speed of Appc 45 (Mbps)
- A 56k modem is 56 kilobits per second (Kbps)
- DSL ranges (Download) from 256 (Kbps) to in certain situations 9 Mbps
- Cable modems also range (Download) 256 Kbps up to 10 Mbps.

In the case of Cable & DSL the speed has a lot to do with the ISP, how well the ISP manage their network, and how much they want to throttle their customers speed (based on provisioning).

Really big circuits use Fiber and have classifications of OC-x where an OC-3 is (appx) 155 Mbps, an OC-6 is twice that and so on... well ito the Gigabit per second area.

I think the speed setting in Limewire is meant to allow other users to determine connection speed (based upon a given users honesty) and allow Limewire to set certain thresholds internally based upon the users' internet connection. (# of connections for one)

All of the numbers are from memory but they are reasonably close to the actual thing. (memory is not as good as it once was)

I appreciate the responses, but i,m still confused as to why the big differance in the two D/L speeds. We have the same ISP and are down loading similar files. Could it come down to luck of the draw, time of day, or phase of the moon. It seems all things equal we should see the same results, yet his downloads are consistantly 10 times faster.

Don

There are configuration issues relating to your NIC (Network Interface Card) that may be part of the problem... I experienced substantialy better performance when I used the tools located at
DSLReports.com see the item called Tweak test. Also the Speed Test item can give you an idea how your connection is performing in general.

Beyond that the ISP network managment could be an issue... cable modems are on Ethernet segments... basicly subscribers are grouped into segments... if too many subscribers are lumped on the same segment (think party-line) performance can be severly impaired. It could be you and your friend are on different segments ... and your segment is overloaded.

As with everything on the internet the slowest point between you and the other end will be the limiting factor ... regardless of the connection you may have.