Ask HN: Recourse Against My ISP's False Advertising?

2 pointshalis2 comments

My internet becomes completely unusable for all other purposes when downloading at about 6MB/sec.

I am paying for 50MB/sec.

Can I do anything about this? Are they throttling me?

Perhaps you are confusing mega bytes per second with mega bits per second? Internet speeds are usually sold in bits per second, while file transfer speeds are usually reported in bytes per second.

Let's do the math.

50/8 = 6.25

Subtract a little for overhead and 6 megabytes per second sounds reasonable.

On a quick glance, with those numbers cited, it appears that you may have fallen into the Mbits/Mbytes trap.

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