Quote:
Originally Posted by berty_buk
Does 54mbps only mean that I can download at a 10th of that speed eg 5.4Mbps as when I use the wired PC down stairs I get 10 Mbps or there abouts.
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In a word, no.
Comms speeds are normally quoted in bits per second e.g your router is rated at 54Mbit/sec, your link to VM is rated at 10Mbit/sec. Divide by ~8-10 to get the speed in bytes per second (8 bits per byte plus ~1-2 start / stop bits).
Your speed tester is testing THROUGHPUT (end-end transfer from disc to CPU to network at the host, across the Internet and from router to CPU to disc at your end).
Traffic arrives at your house at a maximum speed of 10Mbit/sec. In practice you may find it difficult to achieve that sort of throughput because
a) the speed of your radio link depends on signal strength, with a weak signal the radio may have a lot of error checking and correction to do. I've seen 54 Mbit links run at 5 Mbit/sec in difficult conditions.
b) the throughput speed depends on the performance of the target machine; the CPU has to process all the incoming traffic and write it to disc. You may find that an old and slow laptop can't keep up.
c) there are various processing latencies e.g it takes time to find and open the file you are writing to, it takes time to write things to hard disk. It's not known as Windoze for nothing ..
It might be worth testing the download speed with the laptop near the router, that should give you an idea of whether the bottleneck is the radio link or the laptop.
HTH.