>>My calculator said 28.8 Kbps divided into 15,850Kb would be accomplished in 550.34722222 seconds.
Weeeel, we're slipping decimal places here. Here's the short answer. <g>
28.8Kbs = 28,800 bits per second. At 8 bits per byte, that's 3,600 bytes per second.
Assuming overhead of 20% for parity bits, TCP packet headers, control codes, etc., that's 2880 bytes per second. It's simpler to just divide the bit rate by 10 to arrive at a byte rate.
So, 15,850KBytes divided by 2.88KBytes = 5,503 seconds, or 92 minutes, or 1.5 hours for a 15MB download. And, as Peter Peter Pumkin Eater Points Out in His Pervasive and Perpetually Pointless Posts, the file was already compressed, so your best throughput was the real transfer rate.
In other words, to use Wiggleworth's aphorism, you ficked up your calculation. But, you cry, how does that explain the six hour download time?! Alas, my scruffy friend, it's because you and 5 million other fools, er, misguided souls have chosen to all download the file more-or-less simultaneously, choking Billy's servers and clogging the Internet for all the rest of us.
5 million downloads = 5,000,000 x 15,860,000 x 10 bits per byte = 7.9E+14, or 793,000,000,000,000 bits, or 7,648,534 hours of download time at 28.8kbs.
Was it worth it? |
