Six Things You Don't Know about Broadband! (3)

Author: Jerry Niu From: http://www.free-broadband.org Time:02/09/2007 Viewed:13 times

Six Things You Don't Know About Broadband (3)

Do you know broadband?

You may answer yes. I know you may have tried different broadband from several broadband ISPs. You may have installed broadband by yourself several times. You know broadband speed - 2Mb, 8Mb or 24 Mb. You may understand the monthly usage and control your usage. But if you are not a technician in that area, you may not know everything behind these numbers. There is something broadband ISPs will not tell you, or try to write it in a shady corner on their web page.

Let me tell you all these things:

Connection Rate:

Now, we know the actually speed broadband ISPs provide to us. However, there is another bad news - you may have to share the bandwidth with other 49 people.

So in Internet rush hour, the real speed may be slow down to 160 Kb a second. That is 20 KB per second.

Wonder why? Because there is a connection rate for broadband! Few broadband ISPs tell customers its connection rate on an explicit place on the web site. But it does affect the speed a lot.

So what is connection rate? Connection rate shows the number of users who share the bandwidth on a single broadband connection between your local exchange and your broadband ISP. Normally, the connection ratios are 50:1 and 20:1.

In UK, the connection rate for home broadband is 50:1, which means you would likely to share your bandwidth with 49 other users, of course, never more than that number. The connection ratio for business broadband is 20:1. It will be much faster in Internet rush hour.