I'm currently living outside of the united states (Island of Dominica in the Caribbean) and I signed up for a cable internet connection. Granted the company I went with doesn't have the best track record, but only other alternative was dial-up. My computer (windows xp) says that my LAN connection speed is 10.0 Mbps(oh how that would be nice), however I've been trying to download something (Aol messenger) for the last 2 hours that says it's current "transfer rate" is 485 bytes/second. First question, why would xp say that I'm connected at 10 Mbps and only be downloading at 485 BYTES/SECOND?????? Secondly, is there something I can do to tweak the system to download faster, or does this seem to be a provider problem? Honestly how slow can a cable service be! Any help will be greatly appreciated! Thanks Q

10 Mb/sec is the maximum speed of the network card it has nothing to do with your connection speed. Run some speed tests You are downloading with AOL messenger your speed cannot be any faster than the person you are downloading from How are your speeds when downloading from a website? Go here and test your speed http://www.pcpitstop.com/internet/default.asp

Try www.dslreports.com and www.speedguide.net Your system is set for dialup and needs to be modified to take advantage of cable.

Hey chronicxp, I did test on that website and the speed ranged from 4 kb/s to 9 kb/s

That can be confusing! 10Kbs equals approximately 1KBs Notice the lower case b and the upper case B 10Kbs = 10 k 'bits' per second 1KBs = 1 K bytes per second So make sure you aren't comparing apples with oranges

That is not a good speed for cable. I thought maybe you were slow because of being in the carribean so I tested my connection in Madrid Spain from NorthCarolina USA at http://195.235.232.22/informacion.html I got these speeds all the way from Spain Velocidad Kbps 2,894.70 Kbps Velocidad KBytes/sec 361.84 KBytes/sec There are many settings you can adjust the best place to go to learn how is http://www.dslreports.com/forum/news,61 There are many experts here who will be happy to help you. At PCpitstop my test speed is Transmission Speed 3697 Kb/s Upload Speed 399 Kb/s DSLReports has all the information to get the most from your internet connection

Ok sounds to me its the providers problem the gateway in your area is SLOW!!! call and demnd them to do a test of your gateway!!! for if that is the problem they have to do is replace the gateway!! its either a computer or server that is crap! I had ther smae problem in Toronto and it took Rogers.com about a month of me buggin them so I went from 300bits/sec back up to 400KB/s and more at times... trust me call your provider!