I have DSL and pay for 2.5 speed. When downloading a file the first 2 mb or so download a about 1.5 mb/sec then slows dramatically.

Can someone explain why is that?

are you behind a router? If so, what's the model?

I've known routers to get bogged down with heavy throughput when hit with many concurrent connections. What are you downloading from? p2p, http (web), ftp?

Not behind a router ATM I am direct connect. Mostly I download http. FTP downloads are stable depending on a lot of varibles beyond my control

have you run a speedtest before? try running one from http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest

I've had it happen to me personally, I always used to think the site I was downloading from would throttle the bandwidth. Other than that, I'm not sure

I have DSL and pay for 2.5 speed. When downloading a file the first 2 mb or so download a about 1.5 mb/sec then slows dramatically.

Can someone explain why is that?

1.5MB/s? That's 12 megabit, and you say you're paying for 2.5mbps so I don't see any problem there!

So this is normal. OK I thought my provider or my hardware was messing up.

A lot of downloads would start very fast but by the end of it would be around 70 kb/sec

if you're on 2.5mbit..

then your max download speed is 320kb/s

(it may appear as 1mb/s for a short ammount of time, this is just windows catching up with the speed, it won't go over 320kb/s in reality)

the maths..

1024 (1mbit) x 2.5 =2560Kbits

divide by 8 to become kb/s = 320