Has anybody ever noticed that most ISP's tell you their connection speed is 14mbps or some rubbish like that, but then when you do a connection speed test its only somethin like 900kbps? Surely theres 1024kb per mb? What happened to the other 13,436kb??

All ISP's quote their speeds in bps (bits per second), where as LW quotes speeds in bytes per second. A Byte is 8 times larger than a bit. So divide the quoted ISP speed by 8 to get your Bytes speed. Byte speeds are normally quoted in capitals, bit speeds in lower-case.
Almost nobody will get the exact speed quoted by ISPs. THere will be speed loss due to distance away you are from the ISP; the further away you are, the lesser speed you will get. There can also be loss of speed if the wires used somewhere between you and isp have not been upgraded to handle the higher speeds. So in other words there are transmission losses.

If you use cable, there can be a loss of speed of local people in your neighbourhood are also using a lot of bandwidth. During peak use periods this may be quite noticeable.

Other losses in speed can be from your home devices, old routers can lose speed. Also if you are networking at home.

Some ISP's will shape speeds if user uses too much or some isp's simply have an anti-p2p approach and will shape p2p bandwidth either specific periods of day or all the time.

14 mbps = 1.75 MB/s (also minus losses such as distance from ISP)

That makes sense.Just a shame i couldn't have the extra 13MB/s though.

Yes I know lol. But that's really 13 mpbs ... not 13 MB/s. 14 MB/s would be 112 mbps (subtract losses such as distance of course.)

Quote: The real world - Speed Enemies: TCP has an overhead in transmission that can be as low as 3%, but ATM overhead is more like 10% .. So you can expect to lose 13% of your purchased speed at least when counting application data transfer rate. Making up a rule of thumb here: Given a broadband line speed, dividing by 8 and taking off 13% is a reasonable estimate of the maximum likely data download speeds (in bytes of data) you will manage to get. rogers yahoo hi speed internet (I quoted this a few years ago, I think the page details may have changed since, but is still true.)

OH ... and if using wireless routers ... beware .... they generally are not reliable for heavy bandwidth use. They will have inconsistent speeds, will struggle with too many connections such as bittorrents require, and may even occasionally lose connection. Ethernet/network cables are much more reliable.