BitTorrents download speeds

[rgarjr]

Assuming there's plenty of seeds

Lets say you have a 5Mbp/s download connection. Are you suppose be able to download to about that speed, or it way less than that to say like around 500kbp/s?

 

[belvdr]

Assuming there's plenty of seeds

Lets say you have a 5Mbp/s download connection. Are you suppose be able to download to about that speed, or it way less than that to say like around 500kbp/s?

If you have 500 seeds, each with the possibility of uploading at 1kbps, you'd get 500kbps download on your side.

 

[NoNameBrand]

Does your ISP throttle Bittorrent traffic? These days, the answer is probably at least a 'yes, sometimes', if not simply 'always'.

 

[guzzlamiamor]

The problem is your speed downloading and the speed your isp gives you are measured differently. Your speed is in megabits, while download speeds are measured in kilobytes. Here is a simple converter to show you:

http://www.matisse.net/bitcalc/?input_amount=10&input_units=megabits&notation=legacy

If you have a 5MBps connection, which is rather common (mine is 10), then you should get max 640kbps on a program like uTorrent if you don't change the way speeds are measured (not even sure you can). I can get close to my max of 1280kbps on a well seeded torrent.

 

[apfhex]

Lets say you have a 5Mbp/s download connection. Are you suppose be able to download to about that speed, or it way less than that to say like around 500kbp/s?

The answer to this is not simple, there are so many variables.

Depending on your ISP, the 5Mbps connection you're paying for may not be "guaranteed" bandwidth (typical for cable internet), slowing down when there's more traffic on your node. So even with non-torrent downloads you're not necessarily going to get 5Mbps, or 640k/s.

Your ISP likely throttles torrent bandwidth like NoNameBrand said. I know Comcast does for me, torrents can't go faster than 400k/s most of the time (about half of what I can get).

Aassuming as you are that there are plenty of seeds and you can connect to them (torrent software and router/firewall all have to be configured properly), you SHOULD be able to reach whatever limit your ISP is allowing at the moment, but not necessarily. Generally with torrent downloads the norm for me is to expect them to nowhere near max out my available bandwidth.