You said you're downloading at between 10 and 100 kb/s - do you mean kilobits per second (known as kbps) or kilobytes per second (known as kBps... note the capital B distinguishes between bits and bytes). A byte is 8 times larger than a bit, so this could make some difference but I'm going to assume you meant kilobytes and not kilobits, as most of the time that's what's used.
However, when people talk about broadband speeds they use megabits and not megabytes. So, when the helpdesk person said you should get between 9.5 and 13 mb/s he was actually talking about megabits per second and not megabytes. Again a megabyte is 8 times larger than a megabit. So converting your broadband speed from megabits to megabytes means you're getting between 1.1 megabytes and 1.6 megabytes per second.
This means you're currently downloading at 100 kilobytes per second when your line should give you at least 1.1 megabytes per second, or you're getting under 10% of the potential of the line. That's a rough figure as there are 1024 kilobytes in a megabyte... but I was just interested in what percentage you're getting.
To me, that doesn't sound like you're being throttled by your broadband provider for using peer-to-peer traffic. I'm not aware of any ISPs that throttle someone by 90% when using P2P. If you looked at your ISP's website then they'd probably tell you if they throttle or do any traffic shaping and by how much, but I don't think that's what's causing your problem.
Similarly, someone mentioned about you potentially using the same wireless channel as your neighbours thereby causing interference... this can be a problem, but you'd get it all the time, not just when downloading via P2P, so again I don't necessarily think it's the case here. To test it, I'd suggest going to a broadband speed test site - such as speedtest dot net - and testing your download speed to see if it matches the 9.5 - 13 megabits that you're supposed to be able to get. If you get expected speeds using a speed test site then you can rule out WLAN channel interference.
Incidentally, the channels to use ideally are ones that aren't used by your neighbours and that don't overlap with the channels they're using. If your network is 802.11b then the only non-overlapping channels are 1, 6, 11 and 14, whereas for 802.11g or 802.11n then the non-overlapping channels are 1, 5, 9 and 13.
Personally, I think the reason your download is so slow - especially if you don't notice a problem normally - is most likely because you're using bit torrent. Bit torrents are useful for spreading files across multiple people - known as a swarm - quickly because of the way it works (you download small chunks of a file and immediately start sharing whatever chunks you've downloaded, whereas before Bit Torrents were invented you had to download an entire file before you could start to share it). But it's still a slow process.
Also, some bit torrent trackers implement a system whereby the more you've uploaded the better speeds you'll get so you may find that although it's painfully slow to start with your download will increase as your upload-versus-download ratio gradually gets better.
I'm not sure how much discusion of bit torrent, P2P, downloading films, etc... is tolerated on Fab so I'd better leave it at that. Send me a PM if you want to know more. |
