As it's been said above, download speed from the internet depends on many factors.
I have a 1Gbits fiber with an excellent ISP in France
As you can see when I "speedtest" my internet connection it's excellent.
However I never experienced such speeds when downloading anything for the simple reason that hosting providers themselves don't have enough bandwidth to provide the maximum to everyone.
The only times I can measure such speeds is when... I use a speedtest server ! Which is more a marketing tool than anything really helpful in real life.
Furthermore, as redvli rightly pointed out, internet routes aren't always stable, and some are particularly congested at times. The more people on the servers, the least available bandwidth ! The greater the distance, the slower the speed (just try accessing some Chinese websites to understand that even with a 10 Gbps connection, it wouldn't be any faster than with a 56k modem like in the 90s). Some providers have peering agreements and can prioritize some traffic but again it depends on many things and no one will let you reach top speeds, just because it's you ! Bandwidth is expensive at carrier level !
As an example, I just downloaded the full image of Debian (3.7 GB)
Average speed around 530 Mbits - Peak maxed at 615 Mbits
This is an excellent result especially with a server located in Sweden.
Would it have gone faster with a 2.5Gbits switch? No because the limit is the other end and on the way ! Not my potential speed !
Besides I have a professional router "pfSense" based on an i3 CPU which has more processing power than most of the home network routers for packet inspections, NAT rewrites and all the required operations. This can also be another bottleneck to consider when one wants to use very high bandwidth networking.
Lastly if you consider to use this 2.5Gbits potential speed on the LAN side of things, don't forget that, unless you use NVMe drives, a Raspberry Pi with the fastest SD-Card or a basic USB3 thumb drive is unable to write data this fast. 2.5Gbits / 8 = 312.5 MB/sec. I only get this with high end USB3 sticks and NVMe drives running at PCIe 3x speeds.
PS : There's no such thing as a 2.5 GB switch ! 2.5 Gb yes ! Network speed are measured in bits per seconds, not Bytes ! It would be nice to fix this in your title
I have a 1Gbits fiber with an excellent ISP in France
As you can see when I "speedtest" my internet connection it's excellent.
However I never experienced such speeds when downloading anything for the simple reason that hosting providers themselves don't have enough bandwidth to provide the maximum to everyone.
The only times I can measure such speeds is when... I use a speedtest server ! Which is more a marketing tool than anything really helpful in real life.
Furthermore, as redvli rightly pointed out, internet routes aren't always stable, and some are particularly congested at times. The more people on the servers, the least available bandwidth ! The greater the distance, the slower the speed (just try accessing some Chinese websites to understand that even with a 10 Gbps connection, it wouldn't be any faster than with a 56k modem like in the 90s). Some providers have peering agreements and can prioritize some traffic but again it depends on many things and no one will let you reach top speeds, just because it's you ! Bandwidth is expensive at carrier level !
As an example, I just downloaded the full image of Debian (3.7 GB)
Average speed around 530 Mbits - Peak maxed at 615 Mbits
This is an excellent result especially with a server located in Sweden.
Would it have gone faster with a 2.5Gbits switch? No because the limit is the other end and on the way ! Not my potential speed !
Besides I have a professional router "pfSense" based on an i3 CPU which has more processing power than most of the home network routers for packet inspections, NAT rewrites and all the required operations. This can also be another bottleneck to consider when one wants to use very high bandwidth networking.
Lastly if you consider to use this 2.5Gbits potential speed on the LAN side of things, don't forget that, unless you use NVMe drives, a Raspberry Pi with the fastest SD-Card or a basic USB3 thumb drive is unable to write data this fast. 2.5Gbits / 8 = 312.5 MB/sec. I only get this with high end USB3 sticks and NVMe drives running at PCIe 3x speeds.
PS : There's no such thing as a 2.5 GB switch ! 2.5 Gb yes ! Network speed are measured in bits per seconds, not Bytes ! It would be nice to fix this in your title
Statistics: Posted by dwam — Sat Nov 29, 2025 11:00 am