Why your internet isnt' as good as you think it is.

I saw a post on the twitter of the Magazine New Scientist about a 12MB/s satellite ISP, which I saw and immediately thought wow! Only when I got halfway down the page did I realize that they'd made a typo, and it was in fact only 12Mb/s.

A little underwhelmed, I posted this slightly cynical reply

Then about 10 minutes later...

Trying to avoid being cocky over this admittedly minor victory I began to wonder how many people really know what they're paying for when they subscribe with an ISP.

For the mostpart, when you see or hear an ad for an ISP, you'll find they quote the bandwidth as something along the lines of "up to 20 megabit". As I see it, they're doing it wrong on two counts. The whole business of "up to" is a complaint all in itself, but using megabits is misleading.

What's most likely to make sense to the average internet user is the download speed. If you're downloading something, the speed (transfer rate) is usually quoted in KB/s or MB/s.

When I first began to use the internet in the late 90's, nearly everyone was using a 56Kbps modem over a phone line.

That's K, as in kilo, as in 1000 (or 1024)
and ps (or "/s") simply meaning "per second"
The B or b is the part which makes the crucial difference.

A lower case b means bits, and a capital B means bytes, and the case of that letter makes an eightfold difference! 1 byte is equal to 8 bits, therefore what might be called a megabit line only allows a transfer rate of 128 kilobytes per second.

Add this to the "up to" and you're not really getting as much as the ad might make you think!

Where I live, the telephone exchanges are really quite dated. This means that the "up to" in the ad really begins to come into play! While someone connected to a brand new exchange might actually get the quoted speed, I would be doing well to get a quarter of that!

Luckily, that only goes for internet through the phone line, and since I go through cable, these same problems don't apply. What's quoted as a 30 megabit connection will (more often than not) allow for downloads of over 3MB/s (30Mb/s speed would be 3.75MB/s). it does however tend to cost a bit more.

There's are websites around (like uswitch) which tell you the capabilities of the local exchange, and tell you what other providers are available. For some reason, people seem to think that different providers will get different speeds, but most of them are about the same!

The only noticeable difference packages would be if they actually used different mediums to connect. BT, Sky, talktalk and all that all use the phone line! Cable is completely seperate.

Mobile broadband, is again of course different, but it's less likely to be better than the phone line. It's possible, don't get me wrong, but you'd have to be far enough away from a phone exchange, but still within good 3G mobile phone coverage. That's could be set to improve when 4G comes around but that's not a sure thing. Mobile coverage is only any good if there aren't a lot of people using it at once! 4G will of course be an improvement when it comes, but there's a limit to it's capacity. We'll have to wait til the end of this year at the earliest to find out. It's using some of the airspace freed up by converting TV to digital.

I've probably rambled on for longer than most of my "readership" 's attention span now.
Thank you, and goodnight