Fastest Internet?

I'm thinking of switching my internet provider or at least going up a notch.

I find the speeds confusing.

Can someone tell me what is the fastest internet available now?

The one I am considering has an advertised speed of 25 Mb download and 1 Mb upload (whatever that means

The one I have now says it is 100.00Mbps. So I'm confused.

I would really appreciate it if someone could explain what the speeds mean and what the units actually are.

Thanks.

Right now through my cable company I am getting about 10mb down and 2mb up.

You can pretty much spend as much as you want. Want a setup that costs (and is worth) US$50,000 per month? Not a problem..


M is 'million' (or mega) b is 'bit' and ps is 'per second' so 25Mbps is 25 million bits per second. This is, ***in theory***, how fast you can suck data from the internet onto your PC. The 1Mbps upload means that you can, again in theory, send 1 million bits per second from your PC to the internet.

In general, DSL lines are 'best effort' which means that if the company can get you 80% or so of the advertised speed, they're happy. Then again, if they can only get you 50% of the speed and you keep paying them, they're still going to be happy.


Er.. That sounds kinda high. If you're not in Asia, I'd find it a bit hard to believe.

25/1 is more (far more) than enough to do SL - I run just fine on a 6M/768K line - but if you're also doing other things while SL is running (web browsing or downloading stuff) the higher rate will mean that your line doesn't get maxed out.

You can kinda think of your connection as a pipe.. If you buy a bigger pipe, you can stuff more into it or pull more out of it at once. Once you're doing so much stuff that the pipe fills up, you can't really push/pull more stuff until the stuff in there moves out of the way.


edit: also, speeds are almost in megaBITS (Mb) and storage sizes are almost always in megaBYTES (MB). One byte is eight bits so one megabyte is eight megabits.

If you had, say, a 1MB file and wanted to upload it over the 1Mb-upload line you're looking at, it would take (at best) 8 seconds. To download the same file on the 25Mb-download line you're looking at, it would take (at best) about 1/3rd of a second.

Your 100Mb number is probably your local router speed, not the speed of your ISP.

Satellite/cable/DSL tends to be around 1Mb coming to you, and less than half that when you send data. More expensive packages (and better areas) will offer higher numbers.

The data that flows from some site (SL, google, whatever) has several constraints on the total speed. How fast can the server send it, how fast is the senders ISP, how fast is the network from there to your ISP, how fast is your ISP, how fast is your link to your ISP, and how fast is your household network.

The best you can get is the slowest of all those. In many cases, the slowest is outside your control.

Given all that, 25Mb down is about 25 times faster than me.

One other detail...be clear about Mb (mega bit) and MB (megabyte). 1 MB is about equal to 8 Mb, since there are 8 bits in a byte. (I am being approximate, because, of course, there are a million techinical details.

Do you ever use ctl-shit-1 to turn on the little performance meter? it shows the Mbps that you and SL are using.

Do you ever play with the Bandwidth preference? I set mine as high as I can such that I get almost no packet loss.

Thank you everyone.

I think the 100 Mbps is the router speed; that was what was confusing me.

I am presently running at the same rate as Lee with my ADSL line. That makes sense now.

So the cable would be much, much faster but probably faster than I really need.

Thanks very much Lee and Meade...you know your stuff.

Tybalt, how are you finding using cable? Is it much different than ADSL? Also I have a wireless router attached to my ADSL. Are you doing that too?

If you have neighbors with cable internet, especially ones that do a lot of online gaming or things like SL, you should ask them about how well it does.

All cable users in a neighborhood sorta share the same pipe. It's a much bigger pipe than DSL ones are but if the area is full of kids up/downloading DVDs 24/7, it can fill up and slow everybody down. DSL is a direct line from you to the phone company so even though it's a smaller pipe, it's all yours - no sharing. If your neighbors are fine with theirs, yours will probably be ok. If they all say it sucks, DSL may be a better route for you.

Then there's FIOS. If you can get that, it'll spank both DSL and Cable.


Hope it helped.

Thanks Meade!

I think I'm going to stick with what I have for the moment.

I may get a RAPTOR drive to speed up my cache instead of changing my internet.

So much to learn..who woulda thought a "game" would have led me to so much to learn.

It's not a game. It's a place

With all these so called faster broadband packages being offered on the market, the one bit they won't tell you is Contention Ratios. This is the ratio of other people you share your bandwidth with.
'Normally' business packages use a 20:1 ratio, 'domestic' is 50:1, however in my experience, by coupling several nodes together to increase the bandwidth, they also increase the contention ratios so your gain becomes watered down.

Would you buy a 1.5mbps connection at a ratio of 20:1, or a 8mbps connection with a ratio of 50:1? Upload speeds rarely gain bandwidth with download bandwidth, normal 1.5mbps yeild 256-512kbps, 20+ mbps yeild 512-1024kbps. All those figures are subjective, as the 'best possible acheivements'. Expect 75% of those on a good day. Packet loss and ping ms's are also an important factor. Use the many forums and reporting websites on the internet to research your choices.

My advice, email any potential ISP and ask them outright, what is the contention ratio for their advertised packages and how long is that ratio going to remain firm. Even though it is difficult to prove contention ratios, at least you have that statement in writting, should things start to get slower and slower. Personally, I prefer the Business packages, they rarely screw over business as its their main stay revenue, 'domestic' connections just fill in the twilight hours when business isn't using the system. Business packages also give you better customer service and they aren't that much more expensive.