Maybe your Internet Service Provider doesn't accurately give you a good estimate of how fast your Internet connection is. Some people misunderstand that an Internet connection speed of say 246kbps is not Kilobytes per second but kilobits per second.

If you think that your internet connection speed is about one tenth of what you thought it would be then this is why. A kilobit is relatively the same as one tenth of a kilobyte. Internet Service Proviers will advertize there connection speeds in megabits per second or in kilobits per second.

Follow up:

If you have an internet connection speed of 1.5mps this means that it is about the same as 150 kilobytes. Most of us are used to understanding things in bytes not bits because when we work with file size we are dealing with bytes. When talking about speed of a data transfer we are talking about bits of data.

To test your connection you can visit several different websites out there. Here is a list of those websites:

List of Internet Connection Speed Testing Websites

http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/

http://www.speedtest.net

http://www.testmyspeed.com

http://www.pcpitstop.com/internet/default.asp

You may notice that they each will give a ruff estimate of your connection speed but the average should be a good indicator of your Internet connection speed. The way that these websites work is that data is sent from the website to you your computer and the online program tests to see how long it takes to send the garbage data. The less time it takes, the faster you Internet connection speed.

If you test your Internet connection several times you will notice that it will change. If nothing is being downloaded on your computer or on any other computer on your network and you still get up and down readings then this is usually normal because connections speeds do fluxuates. The frequency of a computer's processor even varies based on several things such as power input and demand from the user.