| So how fast is your internet connection anyway? Yeah, I know that many
companies now (especially DSL and cable) are advertising
speeds of upwards of a megabit or more. Well, what does that really mean?
And how fast is 56K or 28.8 anyway?
I know this is hard to believe if you're relatively new to the world
of computers or the internet, but back in 1978 modems were running at 110
or 300 bits per second (the technical term is baud). The table below is
not precisely accurate but gives a rough idea of how the speeds have been
working their way upwards for the past few years.
| Speed Timeline |
|
1978
|
100 to 300 baud
|
|
1988
|
1200 to 2400 baud
|
|
1993
|
14,400 baud
|
|
1995
|
28,800 baud
|
|
1997
|
33,000 baud
|
|
1998
|
56,000 baud
|
|
1999
|
1,500,000 baud DSL and cable mode connections
|
In comparison, local network connections run at 10,000,000 bits per second
at least and it is becoming more common for these to be running at 100
million bits per second.
But what does all this mean? Well, a character is eight bits (a bit
is a zero or a one, and it takes 8 of them to make a single character).
The letter K means 1,024, so a 28K modem is 1,024 times 28 or 28,672 bits
per second (also called bps).
Now divide the 28,672 by 8 and you have the maximum number of characters
per second that your modem can run at. This works out to 3,584 characters
per second, which in today's world is considered pretty slow (you will
understand why shortly).
Interesting fact: Modem speeds are all standardized by International
Telecommunications Union (ITU). The ITU defines 28.8K bps modems as v.32
and 33.6K bps modems as v.34.
All right, now you are getting 3.5 thousand characters per second, if you
have a 28K modem, right? Well, not exactly. First off, the quality of your
phone line may drop that down significantly. What happens is your computer
sends some data to the "internet"; it is received but there was an error,
so the internet computer requests that the data be resent. The worse the
quality (you can hear how bad it is by the amount of static on the line)
the more times the data has to be resent, the slower the line.
On top of that, there is a certain amount of overhead associated with
each connection. This is "handshaking", which means the modem is asking
the internet computer if it got the data and the internet computer is responding
"yes" or "no". There is also a certain amount of data to define what is
being sent (an email or a web document or whatever) which eats into the
line speed.
Well, okay, let's assume you are actually getting 20K from your 28.8K
modem. There's worse news to come. The internet has lots of things that
actually have nothing to do with content. There are cookies,
advertising banners, comments, web bugs, and
a host of other things inserted into your web experience. A typical advertising
banner is 7.5K, which in our 20Kbps example requires several seconds to
load to your machine.
What can you do? First, if you can get a DSL or Cable modem connection
to the internet. It will probably cost about the same or only slightly
more than your dialup connection and will improve your surfing experience
by many times.
Second (or if you cannot get a higher speed connection) get an ad
blocker installed on your system to remove those ads before they are
downloaded to your machine. Why even bother downloading banners that you
are never going to look at anyway?
I hope that helps clear things up a bit. |
