I'm not sure if it's widely true, but my provider (Shaw in Vancouver) does a sneaky thing where they burst me to 25Mb/s downstream for the first few meg of a download, and then put it back to normal (~8Mb/s).<p>It is useful for some real-life cases, but it also makes speedtest.net tests very mis-representative.<p>I think the downstream is quite acceptable for what I pay. The upstream is ass though (0.5Mb/s).