What would my download speed actually be?

[Tony]

I'm upgrading to time warner cable in a few days and i was testing out how much faster my download speed and time is compared to my old internet. I had the really old version of AT&T and my download speed was 76kbps which was really slow.

If i took the 3mbps offer from TWC would my download speed be 3mbps? I did my math and it would be 39x faster than the download speed that i currently have.

However, when i went to http://www.speedtest.net to test out the internet speed of my school as I am currently using the computer in my class right now. The result was a 14mbps download speed and a 10mbps upload speed however when I actually tried to download a 1.6gb file, it didn't download at 14mbps but instead at 800kbps. That is 18x slower than the download speed reported to me by speedtest.net

That made me think that if i got a 3mbps from TWC it wouldn't actually be 3mbps if i tried to download and would probably be significantly slower. Or will my download speed would be exactly 3mbps because it's not like a school where every computer is on the same server sharing internet speed?