[jambutty]

Originally Posted by blazey

I thought internet services had all gone to unlimited downloads now.

I thought your bandwidth was the speed you get your internet from the telephone exchange thing?

BT advertises unlimited 8Mb internet, hence why I feel I am correct to an extent.

It also says...

• Wireless BT Home Hub 2with BT Hub phone3
• A fast, reliable connection –
  up to 8Mb download speeds4
• Unlimited downloads
  (fair usage policy applies)
• 24/7 customer support5
• An additional phone line with inclusive UK6 calls
• Unlimited Wi-Fi minutes per month7

Speed and download capability are in two seperate bullet points and the 8Mb comes under the speed bullet point, not the download limit.

The speed of your internet shouldn't increase over what they say you can get, because they check the maximum capable speeds from the telephone exchange... so I don't quite understand what you are complaining about because it doesn't seem possible.

Maybe Entwisti can enlighten us, as I am no computer genius

Let me enlighten you blazey.

Bandwidth is how much data passes between your computer and your ISP or if you like downloads. But downloads is a bit misleading as the bandwidth also includes uploads.

When you access a web site your computer sends a message to that web site which in effect says, “hello, I’m here. Can I look at your web site?” The web site replies with the web page data and you see the result on your screen.

Download speeds refers to how fast that data is transferred. ISP’s quote up to 8Mb or 10Mb in some cases in the full knowledge that most people will only ever get around 2Mb. Because not everyone can live close to an exchange and it is only those computers close to the exchange that will achieve 8Mb. Download (downstream) speeds are on average about 2Mb but upload (upstream) speeds are around 290Kb.

My upload speed is generally 288Kb and download 2.272Mb.

Download speeds are measured in Megabits whereas bandwidth is measured in Gigabytes. If both download and bandwidth were measured in the same way 8Mb would become approx 0.8Mb and 2.2Mb would become approx 0.22Mb but that doesn’t sound so fast.

There are 8 bits (small b for bits) to a byte (large B for bytes) but there is a start and stop signal as well so it makes a byte nine and a half bits. Most people accept 10 bits to a byte for ease of calculation.

Just to finish off a Megabyte is one million (1,000,000) bytes. A Gigabyte is one thousand million (1,000,000,000) bytes.

Just to complicate matters further 1MB isn’t 1,000,000 bytes but 1,048,576 bytes and 1GB isn’t 1,000,000,000 but 1,073,741,824 bytes.