Being throttled or am I stupid?

[mickket435]

I honestly didn't know what to put in the title that would fit the circumstances of what I'm going to explain but I hope it captivated enough of you to take a look.

Recently I ran a speed test at my house and my friend's house just to overlook our overall connection speeds. My internet speed is relatively (for lack of better terms) * and his is alright. Whenever I download anything my peak download speed is 350kb/s (yes, I know it's bad) and my friend has a peak download speed of 7mb/s.

However when I ran the speed test it said my download speed was 3mb and his was around 6mb. A distinct difference, however in comparison to mine I am all the way down to the kilobites.

Why is this?
*Future note, I do plan on buying new internet but currently right now I haven't had the time to do it and it's not actually that demanding as my ping is fine and I can play games and whatnot, but it's good to at least be able to resolve some things before I have the option to update them.

 

[USAFRet]

You're measuring different things.
Speedtest.net and your ISP reports in megabits per sec. So, you have 3 megabits per sec. Your friends, 7 megabits per sec
Almost all downloading tools show speed measured in megabytes. Approx a 8:1 ratio.

so...3 megabits per sec is about the same as 350 kilobytes per sec.