Do You Need More From Your Internet Service
Many people believe their internet connection is not sufficient. Unfortunately, the information out their regarding internet speed is misinformation, rumor, and confusion. Why would anyone need to change their internet service? Some people find their connections more than adequate and see no need in upgrading. Other people may find their broadband connections are not performing nearly as well as they had hoped it would. Perhaps some people have acquired new responsibilities or uses for the internet they had not previously known. Not to mention, there are still many people using dial-up. Of course, dial-up can never go as fast as broadband, but some still want to know how to wring every drop of speed possible out of their lines.
Luckily, there are things you can do to improve activities, such as web browsing, and things you can do to reduce the amount of data sent across the wire for certain activities. Bandwidth and latency are the two variables that most directly affect your connection speed. While bandwidth in PC architectures or communication systems is commonly understood, communication latency is less widely talked about, but is also important. In fact, even if you have high bandwidth, the latency of your connection can turn your super-fast pipe into a sluggard.
Low bandwidth and high latency is the worst. Not only do you not have much of a pipe, but everything arrives in a trickle. Traffic on the Internet is broken up into packets, which are sent out and then reassembled in proper order at the destination. Latency is how long it takes for a packet to arrive, and it is also used to describe how long it takes before return packets arrive from a destination system to your system in response to a particular request you initiate. High bandwidth and low latency are the best combination: the packets arrive quickly and have plenty of bandwidth to support them.
For casual users it's less frustrating. Things like email aren't as dependent on latency, since they mostly transpire in the background. On the other hand, a high-bandwidth, high-latency situation can be observed with many satellite-based Internet links. While the bandwidth may be as high as 768Kbits/sec, the lag time between clicking on a link or sending a command and actually receiving data back can be a second or more. This makes satellite Internet nearly useless for many on-line games, many of which demand a latency of less than half a second or better.
You should know that latency depends on a number of factors. The biggest factor is the quality of the intervening routers, which has a lot to do with the style of the connection. A satellite link is slower than an optical link simply because the data has to be bounced from the satellite in orbit. Information theory tells us that you can send multiple signals in parallel, which will carry more information than a single signal, but all the signals will still travel at the same speed. Cable or DSL lines generally have far less latency, but it all depends on what's happening on those lines.
