<p>At most universities, the infrastructure you get is so different from home internet that it becomes your LAN connection, not your internet uplink, that limits the speed.</p>
<p>When you use internet at home, you usually have some WiFi or LAN connection, with 802.11b starting at 11mbit and 802.11n going up to 270mbit. If you’re a geek with some Gigabit ethernet hardware, then up to 1gbit. However, as soon as you get to the uplink, your ISP only sells you up to 8mbit (for DSL) or 50mbit (on 154mbit shared between all your neighbors) for cable.</p>
<p>Once you get to college, the usual setup is several hundred megabits (up to gigabits) of bandwidth going to various other places on the internet. However, by the scale of things, a large portion of that will be available to you at the right times. However, this time, the bandwidth is limited by your 100mbit ethernet port in your room, if not your 802.11g setup. Then, there’s things like TCP overhead, peak hours (where the bandwidth gets shared, etc.), and different bandwidth to different websites based on which uplink things go thru.</p>
<p>An analogy is that at home, you have a driveway in which you can go 100mph, but you can only go 10mph on the highway connecting to the rest of the world. In contrast, at college, there’s a complicated road network of highways of various widths in which you can go up to 1000mph in light traffic, but your driveways are still 100mph unless you get lucky. Oh, and you’re out of luck if your car can’t go the “limit”.</p>
<p>One relative measure to keep in mind is that your hard drive maxes out at approximately 500mbit/sec. That is how fast your computer reads data from the hard disk. So, even if you did have a gigabit ethernet incoming connection, your download speed would actually be limited by how fast your computer can save data to the hard disk!</p>
<p>Short answer: it’s usually too fast to matter! You should be looking at reliability instead.</p>