Confusion with WiFi speeds- can someone clarify please? ...

[m654321]

Just to tack onto Trinidad...

When you tested in LL you checked the Speed of the WiFi NIC and/or if you would be connected the internal NIC, only the speed of the card(s) in the computer.. You're provider is referring to your bandwidth think of it as "speed to the router"..
You can check your ISP up/down speed here:  http://openspeedtest.com/

The "speed at the router" is what allows multiple devices to access at the same time, a lower bandwidth would lag at high utilization. Streaming a movie to couple devices, play a game and download your favorite Linux distro simultaneously and the movie may buffer or the game may lag in play or possibly take longer to download (different effects depending which takes precedence).
Hope it helps clarify

Thanks firenice03 - I need to just go over what you said and check that I've understood.
I observed two different speeds because the speeds represent two different things as follows...

(1) the 37.5MB/s speed I observed on LL's  'Connection Information' (shown as 300Mb/s) represents the throughtput from the router to the PC - this speed is dictated by the WiFi card/driver being used

(2) the 0.17 to 0.45MB/s I observed, for downloading from the internet, represents the speed of throughput from the Internet Service Provider (which can be dictated by the server, as mentioned by rokytnji) to the router

Is what I've just said correct firenice03? Also, what does 'NIC' stand for, presumably 'Network something...' ?

Many thanks for the "speedtest" link you sent - that was really helpful.  I ran the test and got 3.5 Mb/s (download) & 0.28 Mb/s (upload) - the download speed broadly agrees with the figures I observed in (2) above, i.e. 3.5 Mb/s ÷ 8 = 0.44 MB/s.  I'll  run it on my other PC setups as well just to check.

@Trinidad... yes I'm well aware of the mischievous phrase "up to XX speeds" employed by internet service providers - the ideal that we rarely attain - the usual advertising ploy ...

Cheers
Mike