2000Kbitsps / 20 = 100Kbitsps
That means the contract entitles you to an average speed of 100 with the possibility of your connection peaking at 2000 if no one in your contention area is using the service (laymans terms).
And thats without overhead, so say 85Kbitsps / 8 = 10KBytesps. Thats a 36 Megabyte file in one hour, 864 Megs in one day, 25 gigs in one month.
This is the broadband myth, note the ads, up to, thats up to, 40 times faster than dial up.
You could expect say 2 gigs as the network will not be balanced, some users won't use it fully.
There is no doubting that the service is rubbish, but this is based purely on network latency. You can get reasonable throughput when not relying on it being low latency. This is why it's rubbish for VOIP and games.
Take eircom (the best service), it's low latency, when I've used it, i get 30 -40 ms as opposed to
IBB, which is 100-120 or worse. That means if you send some data it may well take 4 times longer for your pc to be told the data was received ok on
IBB than on eircom.
This is the difference between shooting or being shot in a video game.
So you go with eircom, any catch, of course, you need a phone line, 20 bucks and it's going to cost 40(i think it's going from 30-40) for the BB. so 60 euro and you get a cap of 10 gigs(approx).
How do they keep the latency down, rubbish upload speed, this means they have really low latency (there networkks ability to upload data never gets swamped) so your pc can respond to websites etc telling them that you have received the data a ok, so it will send more data, increasing download speed, they offer 3meg down 256k(maybe 512) up, knowing that any customers who hog the network with 3 meg downloads will hit their monthly cap and be stopped.
So you stick with
iBB, with no cap, no blocked ports, but slow day to day speed and crap latency.
Or you go with eircom, good latency, great download speed, crap upload speed, and a cap of 10gigs(this may be higher)