Broadband and Connection Speeds

Broadband is the term often used to refer to any type of fast Internet access. Broadband is designed to give a user instant and fast access to the Internet, 24 hours a day. There are many benefits to having broadband access:

• Broadband is fast, generally 10-20 times faster than a dial-up modem
• Broadband connection is always on – no need to wait for a modem to dial
• Broadband does not interfere with phone service – the phone line is never tied up by Internet access
• It is generally billed at a flat rate so there are no additional dial-up charges
• Several computers can simultaneously access the Internet through the same broadband connection
• Broadband allows access to applications on the Internet that simply aren’t feasible with dial-up
• transferring large files 
• faster access to large web pages
• internet telephones 
• telecommuting 
• videoconferencing.

Broadband speeds are measured in kilobits per second (thousands of bits per second) or megabits per second (million of bits per second). Internet connections have upstream bandwidth - the rate at which data can be sent from a computer to the Internet - and downstream bandwidth - the rate at which data can be received by a computer from the Internet.

Different types of Internet connections are rated for different speeds. For example, many people today still connect to the Internet via a dial-up modem over standard phone lines. Speeds for a dial-up modem are, maximum, 53 Kb/second for downstream and 33.6 Kb/seconds for upstream.

Broadband-type Internet connections such as Cable or DSL have speeds that range from 256 Kb/second to 10 Mb/second, depending on the service selected. Widely available residential broadband services today are usually within the following ranges:

Downstream	256 Kb/second to 4 Mb/second
Upstream	128 Kb/second to 768 Kb/second

To give you an idea of the difference this speed can make, a 3½ minute MP3 music file takes about 18 minutes to download using a 28.8 Kb/s dial-up modem but only about 20 seconds on a 1.5 Mb/s broadband connection. An email containing a family photo takes about 55 seconds at 28.8 Kb/s but only about 3 seconds on a 512 Kb/s connection.