According to a recent BBC article, British internet service providers are not being completely forthright when it comes to advertising realistic figures for ADSL connection speeds. Although many quote figures of up to 8Mbps (1024Kbytes/second§), unless you happen to live next door to the local exchange. In actual fact, the average connection was only rated at 2.7Mbps!
I need to check how Mum and John’s connection is behaving when I get back to Britain, though they are with Pipex, so I am not to worried about it. I’ll also need to see if Dad wants to start his ADSL some time soon, so I can sort things out for him next month.
§ Obviously this figure does not take into account protocol overheads, and would require the server or collection of peers you are downloading from to be running at full steam.