Dialup speeds question

[Capt. Picard]

I've got dialup at home. A 56kb connection. That means a max of 7 kilobytes download. Am I theoretically right so far.

But I just started download of the NFSMW 1.3 patch and it started of at a speed of 25kb/s for about 30s whereafter it drop every thirty seconds with about 10kb/s till it stabled at about 5kb/s, my normal download speed.

Can someone please explain to me why I sometimes start off with a burst of speed whereafter it steadily decreases?

[SlieTheSecond]

Depending on your browser it may have started downloading before you clicked download.

IE my max download is around 375kb/s but sometimes when I goto download (I use FireFox) my download will start at 20mb all ready done and 10mb/s.

Which I know I am not getting it that fast.

[ViN86]

if youre using firefox, it starts downloading the file to your memory before you choose where to save the file. so then when the progress bar shows up, it shows a boost in speed because it was downloading it in the background.

IE may do it too. but if youre using firefox, that explains it.

[Q]

What they said. I've always heard behavior like that called "priming", like you would do to a smaller engine.