Internet Speed Terms

How does it do it all so fast?

The Internet can sometimes seem an exotic place of strange languages and unending secrets. It's not unusual to install new software and when faced with the question of what Internet speed one is running, drawing up a mental question mark. With the Internet so prevalent in daily life, it helps to know what some of its characteristics are, Including internet speed terms.

Bits and Kilobits

There are bits and kilobits.

The smallest form of data in a computer is a "bit." The bit is always expressed as 0 or 1; this is its "binary value." There are generally eight bits in a "byte." Take a collection of one thousand bits, and you have a kilobit. Internet speeds are generally measured in how many kilobits are processed per second. The abbreviation is expressed as Kbps. When you see "56k line" this means that, via dial-up, the internet speed is 56,000 bits-per-second or 56 Kpbs.

The Mega and the Giga

Now we're getting to a higher speed.

Megabytes and gigabytes represent large collections of bits. A megabyte contains one million bytes, and a gigabyte contains one billion bytes. Broadband typically processes at speeds ranging from 1 Mbps to 4 Mbps. It can process higher Internet speed because it utilizes Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) technology by using available frequencies on copper telephone lines to transmit data faster.

Bandwidth

Check the capacity.

Internet service providers (ISP) will often sell their packages based on how much bandwidth they are able to offer. Bandwidth refers to the amount of data that can be transferred. Familiar DSL speeds might include 256k, 384k, 640k, or 768k. In this case, in correlation with the above speeds, normal download speeds would be 28kb per second, 42kb per second, 69kb per second, and 83kb per second, depending on the bandwidth.

Latency

We are moving slowly.

Latency is the measurement in time of how long data takes to transfer from one point to another. "Lag" is another word used to describe latency. High latency is when data is taking an extended amount of time to get from one point to the other, and the user experiences a slow-down in data transfer. This can manifest as slow loading times of Web pages, which gets even more sluggish depending on the complexity of the Web page.

References

• High Speed Internet Glossary
• Speed

Resources

• US ranks 28th in Internet Connection Speed: Report