Sync Speed Vs Actual Download Speed

My Sky Broadband Netgear DG834GT v3 router displays my sync speed details as:

Connection Speed:
Downstream: 7104 kbps
Upstream: 416 kbps

Line Attenuation:
Downstream: 45.0 db
Upstream: 29.5 db

Noise Margin:
Downstream: 7.0 db
Upstream: 14.0 db

From this figures I was expecting to get around 6Mbps for the Downstream.

But I only get 2.1Mbps according to the broadband speed test. See Results below:

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results/id/1213172026968837390.html

Why isn't my actual download speed higher, I though it should be close to the sync speed?

What speed do you get from a download? I find that speedtests are unreliable, yes including the TB one, rarely seeing half my actual linespeed. If I download something like a linux ISO I will easily get the maximum from my line.

I just downloaded the 512MB file from link:

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

it took 38 mins and 1 second to download @ a rate of 229KB/sec

Which I guess is approx 1.9Mbps

If I am on Sky Mid Broadband upto 8MB and my router shows a sync speed of 7104Kbps I would expect a download speed closer to 7.1Mbps not 1.9Mbps - am I right in thinking that?

What is your Windows version ?

If you're on XP, you might need to alter your TCP/IP settings (MTU, etc) for the higher connection speed.

Edited by deleted (Wed 11-Jun-08 11:59:16)

Congestion maybe? Have you tried tests at different times of day? Recently I've found that evenings and weekends, my speeds seem to drop from 3Mb/s to 1Mb/s or so, despite the sync speed staying the same. This is confiemd with torrents, downloads and speedtests.