2012-04-11, 08:22 AM
[MENTION=7450]MuscleWizard[/MENTION];
Really it's mostly meaningless. Your theoretical speed improvements fail to take into account that the download speed cap applies on both ends of the connection.
Just because you can download 'up to 16mb' simultaneously doesn't mean the sites you visit are going to sending you any faster than their own cap which is usually less than 512 kbps.
Since the average website or similar is significantly less than 512k per page anyway the distinction between the two limits is non-existent for the vast majority of activities.
The only point you'd notice a difference is for large downloads and torrents and similar, but again, the other side's cap will have an equal and most likely negating impact.
An easy example would be most video download sides only letting you have around 512kbps, whether that's one file, or 3, and only letting you download up to 5 files at a time. Any speed in excess of 1mbps is going to be plateau'd.
With 16 MBPS download speeds you could however do about 10 of those sites at a time comfortably, where as with 6 you could not. Assuming you have a hard drive that can keep up with those write speeds, and the rest of your network can handle that much throughput.
Think of this increase being expanding a highway from 6 lanes to 16, rather than actually increasing the speed at which vehicles travel on it, because that's really more of what it signifies.
Really it's mostly meaningless. Your theoretical speed improvements fail to take into account that the download speed cap applies on both ends of the connection.
Just because you can download 'up to 16mb' simultaneously doesn't mean the sites you visit are going to sending you any faster than their own cap which is usually less than 512 kbps.
Since the average website or similar is significantly less than 512k per page anyway the distinction between the two limits is non-existent for the vast majority of activities.
The only point you'd notice a difference is for large downloads and torrents and similar, but again, the other side's cap will have an equal and most likely negating impact.
An easy example would be most video download sides only letting you have around 512kbps, whether that's one file, or 3, and only letting you download up to 5 files at a time. Any speed in excess of 1mbps is going to be plateau'd.
With 16 MBPS download speeds you could however do about 10 of those sites at a time comfortably, where as with 6 you could not. Assuming you have a hard drive that can keep up with those write speeds, and the rest of your network can handle that much throughput.
Think of this increase being expanding a highway from 6 lanes to 16, rather than actually increasing the speed at which vehicles travel on it, because that's really more of what it signifies.
It's not having what you want - It's wanting what you've got.