diagnosing network speed bottlenecks [SOLVED]

[Greg Rundlett (freephile)]

On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 1:36 AM, Greg Rundlett (freephile)
<greg-SfI3QVg0eaJl57MIdRCFDg at public.gmane.org> wrote:
[snip]
> I'm generally dis-satisfied with the speed of my Comcast "High Speed"
> Internet connection.  It's touted on the tele as being some
> ambiguously huge amount faster than light travels in a vacuum.
[snip]
> Speed tests like http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest?flash=1 report my
> performance as...
> 4,909 Kb/s Download
> 3,055 Kb/s Upload
>
> But, in my experience downloading files, I rarely get anything like
> that.   In fact, while the DSL Reports Speed Test is checking my
> system, I'm watching the "Network History" graph on the "Resources"
> tab of System Monitor (v2.26.0.1) aka gnome-system-monitor and it's
> not breaking 800Kbps.  I then used wget to download MySQL Workbench
> and it reports 33,373,104 downloaded in ~42 seconds at a rate of 783
> KB/s

Ah, thanks to those who pointed out that 783KBs = 6.26Mbps (or ~2.82GB/hr.)

Sorry, I was misreading Comcast service as being measured in megaBytes
(big B) while it's actually stated in megabits (little b).   Comcast
didn't catch the simple arithmetic / language mistake I was making --
which put me onto the trail of a non-existant problem.  Thanks all for
pointing out that I'm actually getting "standard" bandwidth.

The upshot is that I know more about how various network devices (e.g.
wireless routers) and standards (e.g. DOCSISv2 and DOCSISv3) affect
the capacity of your network.  Plus I found this neat online
calculator http://web.forret.com/tools/bandwidth.asp?speed=783&unit=KB%2Fs
 The downside is that now I know I can't "fix" something and get
faster speeds.  Faster speeds are dependent on spending more money.