Why is my speed only limited to 12% of my max bandwidth?

"Actually, there are three things going on. One is the bits versus bytes issue that others have mentioned. Another is that line speeds are reported in decimal units, not binary units. And a third is that the line has to carry not just data but also address and control information.

A 1Mbps line carries 1,000,000 bits per second, or 125,000 bytes per second. Address and control information takes about 4% of the bandwidth, leaving about 120,000 bytes per second for data. A kilobyte of data is 1,024 bytes, so that means you would expect 117KB/s.

So you're dead on."

"I think your question is about file transfer rate, not differences in in connection rates. It is not about bits or bytes or 1024.

Your file transfer rate will not be synchronous with your connection rate, it will be about 1/8th of the connection rate. that is a MAX rate, so add to that the normal lag of the internet and you get total slowdown. This is an internet fact.

A fact, that those of use using FTP have to deal with. I have attampted to research the issue, but there is not alot of information out there, since not alot of people do FTP, some who do don't realize they are (Google Docs), most FTP activity is small files, and for large files you can just stream the content.

Generally, this is not a problem for DL, since we all have 10M or better home connections, so you can DL at about 1M.

Where this really sucks is on Upload. Home internet connections have an upload rate of less then 1M, usually 768K or 512K. 1/8th of that sucks, about 100k is what i get on a good day, average is around 35k."