Under the speed heading, BOINC shows what I presume is the average speed of an upload or download in progress. I would find it far more useful in knowing what is going on to see the current speed. Is there a way of achieving this?

This will at some stage in about two years time when we are upgraded to superfast, this will probably cease to bother me! Current task has 13 uploads each over 500MB and at under 100KB/s they are taking a while!

You can see the current speeds for active transfers in Transfer tab of Boinc manager.

You can see the current speeds for active transfers in Transfer tab of Boinc manager.

Not in my experience, it shows the average speed as evidenced when there is just one transfer going on using as much bandwidth as allowed, then a second starts and the rate of the first drops only very slowly till some equilibrium is reached. If it was current speed it would then go up at once when a second upload finished but again it rises only slowly.

That's probably because the first upload saturates your upload pipe. It can't immediately go out of the way of the second upload, so that one will slowly climb, until it has about half the upload speed.

That's probably because the first upload saturates your upload pipe. It can't immediately go out of the way of the second upload, so that one will slowly climb, until it has about half the upload speed.

Not sure that explains the slow climb when it goes back to just one upload?

It probably counts an average for some time value. If you enable only one transfer at a time you would get what you are looking for but that would likely slow down your total up- and downloads. Note that the server side may also impose a speed limit for your connection.

Your ISP upload speed is often 1/2 on slow networks, to 1/10th as slow on fast networks, of it's rated download speed.
Quite often uploading 1 file at a time, isn't the fastest way to upload, even if it nearly saturates the network bandwidth.
In such cases, 2 uploads are usually optimal.
In case the Boinc project servers only accept slow transfer speeds (uploads in Boinc manager are slow), you might want to increase the upload queue (more uploads at a time).
As many as needed to saturate your upload speed, usually not exceeding 10 files.

The problem is, if some projects use slow servers, while others use fast servers, your upload will slow down on fast servers, the more files you upload at a time (due to bandwidth overhead).
Anything outside of 2 uploads at a time, increases overhead to the point of slowing down the procedure.

For that reason, many broadband networks will do best with 3 to 4 uploads at a time when uploading to mixed fast and slow servers.
You can change the upload file count in Boinc.

Also check if you're on wifi, if you have good enough network connectivity.
A 1 or 2 bars connectivity may slow down your network traffic considerably. And often placing your computer/laptop or antenna a few feet away, may increase transfer speeds.

For that reason, many broadband networks will do best with 3 to 4 uploads at a time when uploading to mixed fast and slow servers.
You can change the upload file count in Boinc.

At the moment, I have BOINC set to the default of a maximum of 2 uploads/project. I tend to only have two projects going most of the time (CPDN main site and testing branch.) Most of the time I just have my ADSL which has a maximum of about 100KB/s upload. Sometimes when I know I am going to have a lot of large uploads (500MB and larger) I add my mobile which is actually faster with its 4G and use load balancing to combine the two giving between two and three times the speed, some times up to four times.