With various DSL connections you have been told that you will get up to 8Mb per second download speed. The key words within in that sentence is "up to". Typically when you sign up for the DSL service you line will go through a 10 day training period on where it will find the maximum and minimum threshold it can sustain.

After this training period is completed you should be able to receive these results from your ISP. So if you dont receive them ask for them by contacting your ISP support team. This information which you will recieve will give you the maximum download speed you can expect from your ISP. This speed which you recieve is typically relies on the distance you are away from the local telephone exchange. Sometimes this distance isn't on how the crow flies as the cabling may take weird and wonderful routes on getting to your home.  However the closer you are the more download speed you will expect.

You also have another factor involved in your downloading speed and that is contention, which is explained in another knowledge base article.

Cable broadband doesn't experience the same issues as DSL does. You should be able to sustain the full speed which you have paid for from your ISP. So if you have paid for 10Mb of service from your ISP, you should expect 10Mb

You can test your speed of your broadband connection through many websites. I would reccomend this one;

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest.html

This should give you a good indication on how fast your internet connection is.