Broadband providers today seem to be in a constant race to offer the fastest download speeds to their customers. Only five years ago the fastest speeds were 1Mb and 2Mb per second; now it is common to receive up to ten times that speed, with some service providers already talking about 100Mbps.
But what does this actually mean? Big numbers are always a marketing favorite with companies. And is there a difference between upload speeds and download speeds, and if so, what is that difference?
Well, as the name implies, the term means megabytes per second, and refers to the maximum rate at which data can be sent or received over the internet. Today’s wired networks work at speeds up to 1000Mb/s, a term known as 10/100/1000 on the specifications to a laptop. As this implies, the slowest speed, which is all but obsolete by today’s standards is 10Mb/s. Most network adapters support 100Mb/s, which is the speed also supported by games consoles such as Sony’s Playstation 3 or Microsoft’s Xbox. An increasing number of devices, particularly PC networking devices also support 1000Mb/s.
This in turn means that a network running at the industry standard 100Mb/s can send and receive over the local network ten times the amount of data that a 10Mb/s broadband connection supports, but the extra bandwidth is taken up in machines talking to one another, to routers or to printers within the network.
But the download speed – which is all broadband companies seem to want to talk about – and the upload speed are two very different things. The upload speed is normally much slower; on 1Mb/s connections for example, the upload speed is normally 128K/s or 256K/s. Why is this?
The main reason is that as yet, there is not a vast need to send a lot of data back to the internet. Whilst downloading, film streaming and browsing are greatly affected by slow download speeds, downloading is the bulk of what the internet is used for. Thus, the only need for upload bandwidth used to be to send packets of acknowledgement data and email messages; as most email messages were less than 1k in total – up to 2Mb for picture attachments – a fast upload speed was not required.
With the rise in popularity of MMO games, however, that is changing – but it still has a long way to go, if it ever does, before equality is reached. On average, a 2Mb to a 10Mb connection will have an upload speed of between 512k/s and 1.5Mb/s. This is generally enough for most needs, as even the prettiest and biggest MMO game only sends limited packets of data to a server. A 64k/s connection is fast enough to communicate with voice (for such systems as Ventrillo, a popular chat client for reflex based games) while the games themselves generally limit themselves to between 70k/s and 100k/s for their data transportation needs.
Video conferencing and VoIP (Voice over IP) clients such as Skype that support webcams can consume up to 256k/s for a clear video stream, but even so a 512k/s connection can handle several conversation clients plus web browsing plus a games console network game without running out of bandwidth.
There is a difference between upload and download speeds, and it is something to consider when choosing an internet broadband supplier. Compare the little numbers as well as the big numbers, know what you need and what you will be receiving, and your connection should be fast enough to support most internet needs.
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