downloading the magazine

On today's internet, a 2 to 3 Mb/s connection is Stone Age! I have 100 Mb at our house on cable internet. That's the standard package...nothing special.

The PDF file for each issue is about 200 - 250 megabytes. It's a big file. I can see where downloads would take a very long time on such a slow connection.

The difference in speeds can be due to a lot of things. Heavy traffic on the net or your ISP throttling your speed come to mind. Many ISP's offer "unlimited" data, but what they don't tell you is that after you have used some arbitrary amount each billing cycle, they "throttle" your speed and slow things way down. 

When you did your speed test with your current router, the result was about what you expected.  I don't think a new router will speed your downloads up much, if at all.  Now, if you were supposed to get 6-12MB per minute and were only getting 2-3, then a new router might be the answer.

Unfortunately, most speed tests don't provide real world accuracy.  They send small packages to their own server to test uploads (which are usually much slower) and then download small packages from their server to test that direction.  As Rich described above, trying to figure out what's causing your less than stellar results is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.  One potential (and free) solution is to try a download accelerator like Download Accelerator Plus.  It works well for me, especially when the site I'm downloading from seems overwhelmed by people looking for the same thing.  Another option is to do the download in the wee nighttime hours when there will be less traffic.

Chuck

Thank you both for your replies. Might need to break down and spend a little more money each month to get a better connection. It's difficult to try and figure out the different offers by  the phone and cable providers as we don't really need bundled services, and they don't seem to ever list what the standard fees are once the initial offer period is over.