How much faster is broadband Internet, really?
Cable Internet advertisements deliberately dodge the question of how fast the connection actually is. This is because connection speeds can vary widely. Be assured that the worst performance you should ever see on a cable Internet connection will be many times faster than the best dialup connection. The optimum speed, or bandwidth, of the connection is roughly 1.5 million bits per second for data sent from the Internet to your PC, and about 300 thousand bits per second for data sent from your computer to the Internet. This translates to roughly 27 times the speed of a 56K dialup for downloads and about five times the speed for uploads – not quite the factor of 50 that shows up in many ads. The 50x figure is based on the actual speed of many dialup connections, which can be far slower than 56K. Those speeds are not the end of the story, however. A great deal can happen to slow down the performance of your network connection. If the cable needed to connect your Internet service to your c
