Media for Measure DSL speed?

Measure DSL speed?

Hello All,

I have a question about how download DSL speed is measured.

Previously I had 1.5Mb DSL service. When I went to a site such as SpeakEasy to measure my d/l speed, it would show approximately 1.1 - 1.3 Mb which is what I would expect. However when I would use a .bat script in a WinXP console window to measure the speed I would only calculate about half that speed.

The .bat script works as follows:

1) turn on a timer 2) use ftp to download a 1.5MB file from the server of my ISP. 3) turn off timer & save elapsed time 4) calculate d/l speed from the known file size and d/l time

I've recently upgraded to 3Mb service and I have seen my d/l speeds double. However I still see the same relative disparity between the two methods of d/l speed measurement as described above; i.e. the speed measured at SpeakEasy is about 2.9Mb/sec but the speed calculated by the script is about 1/2 that.

Can anyone offer any insight as to why the large disparity?

Thanks