Calculate your download speed
A lot of people doesn’t know how to calculate the maximum download speed they can get from their internet provider.
Here is how it’s done:
Firs you need to ask your internet service provider what’s the download speed they provide to you.
Let’s say for example they give you 12 megabits download speed.
To understand the matter better, here are some conversions:
1 byte = 8 bits1 kilobyte = 1024 bytes1 megabyte = 1024 kilobytes1kilobit = 1024 bits1megabit = 1024 kilobits
Internet connectivity is measured in bits, download speed is measured in bytes.
To do the conversion, we do the following:
The megabits must be multiplied by the same number representing the bytes (megabyte), in our example 12 must be multiplied with (1024*1024)/1000000 (because 1 megabyte is 1024kbytes and 1kbyte is 1024 bytes, but we divide by 1 mil because we need to know the total amount of the difference).
The result is 12*1.048576=12.582912.
We now have to divide this by 8.
The result is 1.572864. This is megabytes.
So, if you have 12 megabits download, your MAXIMUM download speed is 1.57 megabytes (or 1570 kilobytes if you prefer it this way).
Note that you might not always be able to reach your maximum download speed, but if you get a lot lower then what you calculated, probably you should calculate again to make sure you didn’t made mistake somewhere in the calculations before calling your provider and asking them for an explanation.
