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I am travelling abroad and got a 3G connection with actual speed of about 29000 Octets / second (using perfmon and testspeed).

When downloading a youtube video with a software perfmon shows it uses the full speed.

But why does it take many hours to just download 300 Mo of such youtube whereas 29000 = 29 Mo / s and so it should take only a few seconds ?

So I don't understand what this "speed" practically mean. Can you explain ?

Update: the mobile operator advertise 250 Kb/s so why do I get only about 29000 byte / second (I said Octet because it's french unit but it's about the same order as byte).

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"Mo" seems to not be a very standard unit. I assume it's the same as MB , one million bytes(octets) - as the M(ega) means million.

29000 octets/sec is 29kB/sec, not 29 MB/sec, you're off by an order of 1000 times.

So your speed is 0.029 MB/sec. If you want to download a 300MB movie, that'll take almost 3 hours.

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  • Thanks. I updated my question: the mobile operator advertise 250 Kb/s so why do I get only about 29000 byte / second (I said Octet because it's french unit but it's about the same order as byte).
    – user75875
    Sep 29, 2011 at 10:44
  • @user75875 250Kbps = 250 kilobits per second. 8 bits = 1 byte. 250/8 = 31.25 kilobytes per second. 31.25KBps isn't that far off from 29KBps.
    – Jin
    Sep 29, 2011 at 10:48

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