General Question

tinyfaery's avatar

Should it take more than an hour to download a movie rental from iTunes?

Asked by tinyfaery (44209points) April 14th, 2009

I purchased and began my download an hour before I had to leave for work. When I left for work, my download said it still had 33min. left. Is this normal? If not, what can I do to speed up the process?

Oh, I have a year and half year old MacBook that is completely updated.

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10 Answers

squirbel's avatar

Midday, other people may be using the bandwidth. What type of internet connection do you have?

Zaku's avatar

It depends on the bandwidth of your Internet connection (not your computer age), and the size of the movie. A typical complete movie DVD may have about 4 gigabytes of data on it. If you have a 1 megabit per second download rate, that would be, in theory, 450 megabytes per hour, and if it’s cable, you may be sharing bandwidth with others in your neighborhood, and servers between you and the file server, and the file server itself, may be sharing bandwidth and/or have other transmission issues, so yeah, it could take 8 hours or more.

robmandu's avatar

An aside: some interesting info explaining how scalability of the Internet is handled.

SeventhSense's avatar

Like @Zaku said, bandwidth.

SeventhSense's avatar

@robmandu
That Akamai is quite impressive. “Sales should top $400 million by the end of the year.”..

tinyfaery's avatar

I have Time Warner high speed cable. If I plug in directly, instead of using my wifi, will it download faster?

robmandu's avatar

Likely no.

802.11g supports up to 54Mbps, typically averaging about 19Mbps in real world use. But your TWC is likely only 8–10Mbps… unless you’re on some higher tier plan?

Still, it won’t hurt to try. Maybe your router is acting up.

tinyfaery's avatar

It officially took 1hr 48min to download the movie, but it took about 10 min. to sync it to my iphone. WTF?

robmandu's avatar

USB 2.0 has a theoretical maximum transfer rate of 480Mbps… much, much faster than either your wifi or internet conn.

jdogg's avatar

it took mine an hour so as long its not like 3 hours or something crazy like that

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