Typical transfer rate for 2 Mbps ADSL

What sort of transfer rate would you expect from a 2 Mbps ADSL line? I was
downloading a lot of drivers from various sites (eg HP's) on a customer's 2
Mbps AOL line through a Netgear router (cable connection from router to PC)
and I was interested to see that the transfer rate as shown by Windows Task
Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del) was absolutely rock steady at 0.5% of 100 Mbps - in
other words, around 500 Kbps.

Would contention really have reduced a 2 Mbps line to around 512 Kbps - and
would such a reduction have been constant? If I hadn't seen the line speed
indication in the router, I'd have suspected that the line was 512 Kbps. And
it's not just a "funny" with the router: I tried the customer's old Voyager
105 ADSL modem and this reported 2 Mbps but achieved a maximum transfer rate
of around 512 Kbps.

By contrast, my 2 Mbps line from Force 9 achieves around 2% of 100 Mbps (ie
2 Mbps) downloading from the same site - I've just tried it now.

On Wed, 22 Jun 2005 12:33:32 +0100, "Martin Underwood"
<(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>What sort of transfer rate would you expect from a 2 Mbps ADSL line?

About 230Kb/sec. Forgive my capitalistion (or not) - I'm sure you know
what I mean

"Richard Sobey" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
> On Wed, 22 Jun 2005 12:33:32 +0100, "Martin Underwood"
> <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>
>>What sort of transfer rate would you expect from a 2 Mbps ADSL line?
>
> About 230Kb/sec. Forgive my capitalistion (or not) - I'm sure you know
> what I mean

That's what I would have expected: around 200 KB (kilobytes) or 2 Mb
(megabits) per second. Instead I was seeing about 50-55 KB/sec in Internet
Explorer's Download window and about 500 Kb/sec in Task Manager.

Do ISPs ever throttle the bandwidth so you don't get when you pay for? I
know they use "traffic shaping" (ie throttling) for very large downloads -
eg of DVD images. But I'd be surprised if it affected downloads of just a
few MB.

What I noticed was that when I was downloading from a very busy site such as
the Windows Update site, the rate was mainly lower with lots of peaks and
troughs, whereas as soon as I started a download from another site (Hewlett
Packard), the rate went up to a constant level of about 500 Kb/sec. Doing
additional browsing of other web sites while this was happening didn't cause
any higher peaks that 500 Kb/sec, which suggests that something is getting
saturated. Netgear routers can handle much higher traffic volumes - mine
will handle almost flat-out internet access at 2 Mb/sec and LAN traffic of
about 80% of 100 Mb/sec between PCs with fast network cards.

I'm wondering whether AOL have got a problem and whether my customer should
raise a support call.

Martin wrote on Wed, 22 Jun 2005 12:33:32 +0100:

> What sort of transfer rate would you expect from a 2 Mbps ADSL line? I was
> downloading a lot of drivers from various sites (eg HP's) on a customer's
> 2 Mbps AOL line through a Netgear router (cable connection from router to
> PC) and I was interested to see that the transfer rate as shown by Windows
> Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del) was absolutely rock steady at 0.5% of 100 Mbps
> - in other words, around 500 Kbps.
>
> Would contention really have reduced a 2 Mbps line to around 512 Kbps -
> and would such a reduction have been constant? If I hadn't seen the line
> speed indication in the router, I'd have suspected that the line was 512
> Kbps. And it's not just a "funny" with the router: I tried the customer's
> old
> Voyager 105 ADSL modem and this reported 2 Mbps but achieved a maximum
> transfer rate of around 512 Kbps.
>
> By contrast, my 2 Mbps line from Force 9 achieves around 2% of 100 Mbps
> (ie 2 Mbps) downloading from the same site - I've just tried it now.

Get the customer to get onto AOL - it's possible the line is syncing at
2Mbps but it's being throttled to 512kbps by the ISP. Are you sure that the
customer definitely is paying for 2Mbps?

Dan