Speeds,Explained,how,fast,your computer Speeds Explained
----------------------------------------------------------Permission is granted for the below article to forward,reprint, distribute, use for ezine, newsletter, website,offer as free bonus or part of a product for sale as longas no changes a Gone are those times when the companies and the organisations didn't need a hi-tech system to handle them. Owing to the considerable increase in the business sector and thus, an enormous increase in the complexity of the organisational struc
So how fast is your internet connection anyway? Yeah, I knowthat many companies now (especially DSL - for more information seehttp://www.internet-tips.net/System/DSL.htm, and cable) are advertisingspeeds 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 ofcomputers or the internet, but back in 1978 modems were running at 110 or300 bits per second (the technical term is baud). The table below is notprecisely accurate but gives a rough idea of how the speeds have beenworking 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 connectionsIn comparison, local network connections run at 10,000,000 bits per secondat least and it is becoming more common for these to be running at 100million bits per second.But what does all this mean? Well, a character is eight bits (a bit is azero or a one, and it takes 8 of them to make a single character). Theletter K means 1,024, so a 28K modem is 1,024 times 28 or 28,672 bits persecond (also called bps).Now divide the 28,672 by 8 and you have the maximum number of characters persecond that your modem can run at. This works out to 3,584 characters persecond, which in today's world is considered pretty slow (you willunderstand why shortly).Interesting fact: Modem speeds are all standardized by InternationalTelecommunications Union (ITU). The ITU defines 28.8K bps modems as v.32 and33.6K bps modems as v.34.All right, now you are getting 3.5 thousand characters per second, if youhave a 28K modem, right? Well, not exactly. First off, the quality of yourphone line may drop that down significantly. What happens is your computersends some data to the "internet"; it is received but there was an error, sothe internet computer requests that the data be resent. The worse thequality (you can hear how bad it is by the amount of static you can hearwhen you listen on the line) the more times the data has to be resent, theslower the line.On top of that, there is a certain amount of overhead associated with eachconnection. This is "handshaking", which means the modem is asking theinternet 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 isbeing sent (an email or a web document or whatever) which eats into the linespeed.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 actuallyhave nothing to do with content. There are cookies(http://www.internet-tips.net/Security/cookies.htm), advertising banners,comments, web bugs (http://www.internet-tips.net/Security/webbugs.htm), anda host of other things inserted into your web experience. A typicaladvertising banner is 7.5K, which in our 20Kbps example requires severalseconds to load to your machine.What can you do? First, if you can get a DSL or Cable modem connection tothe internet. It will probably cost about the same or only slightly morethan your dialup connection and will improve your surfing experience by manytimes.Second (or if you cannot get a higher speed connection) get an ad blocker(http://www.internet-tips.net/Security/adblocking.htm) installed on yoursystem to remove those ads before they are downloaded to your machine. Whyeven bother downloading banners that you are never going to look at anyway?I hope that helps clear things up a bit.
Speeds,Explained,how,fast,your