What d/l speed should I expect?

[JohnSmithUK]

My ISP is Be Un Limited in the UK. My broadband is advertised as 8Mb, but I think I get a bit less than that because of the quality of my phone line. I don't believe my ISP shapes traffic (can anyone in the UK confirm whether Be Un Limited shape traffic? Should I be enabling protocol encryption?)

My settings are as follows, based on the output of the speed guide tests (which tend to say my u/l speed is around 800 kbit/s or 100 kB/s)

U/l limit: 70kB/s

Connections (per torrent): 90

Max active torrents: 5

Upload slots: 5

Connections (global): 400

Max active d/ls: 4

(Could someone confirm whether these settings are optimal in order to get the highest download speed possible, please? Are the suggested settings from the speed guide any good? When I do the alternate test at dslreports.com my u/l and d/l speeds are usually higher than the speed guide seems to suggest.)

My main question is... what download speed SHOULD I expect? At the moment, I estimate the average download speed to be about 100kB/s, which "feels" slow to me given that the connection is meant to be 8Mb - would other users expect higher download speeds than 100kB/s?

If I haven't given enough details here please let me know and I'll post them right away. Any help and advice would be appreciated.

Thanks,

John

[paintball9]

Yes that looks good, a speed test will usually report your burst speed which is slightly higher than your max sustainable, so to compensate you should use the next highest utorrent setting which in your case is the 768.

As far as download speeds go you should be able to reach somewhere around 900 on a good seeded torrent. Try a test torrent (eg ubuntu distro, or openoffice.org). those are usually good for testing out max speeds.