U-Verse Internet speed questions

[Kotpx3]

I currently have AT&T High Speed Internet and I am getting around 300 kb/s download. I chatted with online support about U-Verse and know that it is available in my area. I plan to switch to U-Verse once my current contract ends. On the AT&T website the U-Verse Pro package is $19.95 and says that the speed is 3Mbps. The person that I chatted with says that 3Mbps is equilvalent to 3 Megabytes per second. However my current High Speed Internet is 3Mbps and I am only getting 300 kb/s. Does anyone know if the speed for the pro package is 300 kb/s or actually 3 MB/s?

[ScottMac]

It would be an extremely rare thing to express this type of bandwdth in anything other that BITS per second (bps).

That said, watch for the way your application reports bandwidth utilization. Some MS Windows appst (like FTP) report BYTES per second (Bps) and some show bits.

If you are paying for 3 Mbps, you should be getting 3 million BITS per second (minus overhead for protocol, packet, and frame overhead). That would be reported as ~320 thousand BYTES per second (ballpark figure) in a perfect connection to a server on your provider's network and geographically close. The overhead percentage varies with the payload size, the payload size thend to vary from app to app.

Keep in mind that a TCP connection to a distant resoure is slowed by the "ACK" time (acknowledgement from the receiver to the sender); the longer the distance, the lower the TCP throughput.

[dholiman]

300KB/sec is about right for 3Mbps.  Whomever said 3 megabits is the same as 3 megabytes is incorrect.  I have Max Turbo (24Mbps) and I max out a download around 2.4 - 2.5 MB/sec.  Long story short, you're getting what you're supposed to be getting.

Regards,

David

UVerse customer since 2009

[edited for privacy – please do not post personal information]

[Kotpx3]

I am planning on getting the U-Verse pro plan and the speed listed is 3Mbps. Does anyone know the actual speed of the pro plan in Megabytes per second?

[Computer-Joe]

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Kotpx3 wrote:

I am planning on getting the U-Verse pro plan and the speed listed is 3Mbps. Does anyone know the actual speed of the pro plan in Megabytes per second?

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8 bits per byte. Upper case "B" equals bytes, lower case "b" equals bits. 3 Mbps equals 0.375 MBps or 375 KBps.

That being said, as mentioned above you will never see a full 3 Mbps with a 3 Mbps plan, optimally you should get around 2.6 Mbps, and AT&T only has to do better than 1.5 Mbps to consider a 3 Mbps install a success.

 


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How can you be in two places at once, when your not anywhere at all?
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I really want to become a procrastinator, but I keep putting it off.
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There are three kinds of people, those that can count, and those that can't.
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“Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature has made them." :Bertrand Russell

[Kotpx3]

Okay, so what I am really getting with the pro plan is only around 375 KB/s?

[Computer-Joe]

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Kotpx3 wrote:

Okay, so what I am really getting with the pro plan is only around 375 KB/s?

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Optimally, you'll get between 300 KBps and 330 KBps when you take out overhead and error correction, and that's probably a best case scenario.

__________________________________________________________
How can you be in two places at once, when your not anywhere at all?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I really want to become a procrastinator, but I keep putting it off.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There are three kinds of people, those that can count, and those that can't.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature has made them." :Bertrand Russell