Why is download slow when file is small

This can be a frustration that keeps you from doing everyday tasks at home and at work. Today, people expect to be able to send and receive whatever they would like from any device. And now, more and more downloads and uploads are happening via cellular connections. There can be many reasons for slow download and upload speeds on both desktop and mobile devices, and Wilson has identified some of the most common culprits.

For both desktop and mobile connectivity alike, it makes a difference where the cellular signal is coming from. If you're in your home on your desktop or laptop computer, where is your router or WiFi gateway located? If you're using your cellular phone anywhere, where is the nearest signal originating? It's important to understand that most common building materials are notorious cellular signal blockers.

When a signal is obstructed, it can certainly impact upload and download speeds on your mobile devices. To close the unneeded programs, you can go to Task Manager. Wired connections are much faster than wireless connection — most wireless connections offer 54 megabit per second speeds, while wired connections can provide megabit per second speeds or more. The download process could be much smoother on your new computer.

What you need to do before upgrading to Windows 10? Please read the guid e carefully. In this post, you can get 5 methods to check Wi-Fi signal strength on Windows 10 PC to quickly determine the network connection performance. Download Partition Wizard. The general idea with this would be to test your speeds using the default DNS servers, and then switch to a manual pair Google DNS are a good bet to see if your speeds are better.

See our article on DNS for gaming for more on this. This could be anything from overloaded servers to technical issues that simply slow down the speeds available at any given time. It can even also happen that submarine cables that connect the internet between countries and continents get damaged , and this can slow down the internet in certain parts of the world. The acid test on this is as mentioned above — plug any suitable device you have into the router directly with a cable and check your speeds using speedtest.

Obviously, we have less control of this, but there are services that can track the current status of ISP services in your country. Word of outages and problems also spreads rapidly on social media these days. The Downdetector service is great to check the status of your current service. Check for your country:.

Internet providers usually get on top of these things quickly nowadays. We realize this article is more aimed at people who are getting much lower speeds than they know their internet package is capable of. In these cases, there probably is something wrong.

However, for users that might be getting speeds a little bit or moderately lower than their theoretical maximum, remember that the way internet packages are advertised can be misleading in certain countries. The headline speeds advertised can sometimes be theoretical maximums that are never or almost never actually reached.

Actual speeds will vary depending on factors like network usage and your connection. This does vary around the world — in the UK for instance, regulators have become wise to this and forced ISPs to only advertise average peak time speeds rather than theoretical maximums users will never actually get. If the cap is low, stick to downloading one file at a time.

The computer itself can be the cause behind a slow download. This happens when it is unable to read its processes quickly. In particular, the Windows registry can be corrupted or may contain many unnecessary files. The computer has to read all of these files before processing the actual download. To fix this problem, you need to clean the Windows registry on a regular basis.

A virus infection can cause a lot of damage. It can also cause downloads to run slow. Viruses, in general, can result in slow performance. When you suspect that malware might be causing the problem, you need to perform a scan.

Once you get rid of the harmful program, you should see an immediate improvement in download speed. Therefore, you need to check if you are using too many files or opening too many programs while also downloading or streaming. This is because opening too many files or programs uses up processing memory that could be utilized for the download. By closing the not-in-use programs or files, you will enable your computer to handle the download process more efficiently.