WHOA that's great! FAST! verify your tests here: www.dslreports.com "test/tools" [left side] "speed tests" [lower left]
So based on my last speed, how long would it take to download a two hour movie? And what is the best software to use? Kaza, limewire?
I use Kazaa to download movies off the net and then delete them within 24 hours. This is so I can decide whether I want to purchase the higher quality DVD and support the movie houses that took the time, money and energy to create these wonderful pieces of artistic work. Now, with that BS out of the way, I have a 3.0 megabit connection and, generally speaking, I can download a movie anywhere between 4-12 hours. The largest limiting factor is not my download speed, but the upload speed of most other people. Since most cable companies limit upload speed to 256k, the bottleneck occurs on the sending side and not the receiving bandwidth (mine, or yours if you are downloading). If it is a popular movie that many people are sharing, it will download faster. Most movies are compressed in Mpeg-4 format and have a file size in the neighborhood of 700 megabytes. I've gotten speeds as fast as 150k bytes a second. At that rate, I'd download a meg in approximately 9 seconds -- so an entire movie would take approximately 6,300 seconds or just under 2 hours. That rarely happens. Average speed is around 30k-50k a second if I'm lucky.