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Broadband and NarrowbandWhat Is Broadband and Narrowband?Just when you think you have a pretty good understanding about something on the Web, someone comes along and invents something newer, better and faster to make things even more complex and gives us something else that we have to learn about. Keeping up with the changes on the Internet is a "Never Ending Process" and it takes some time and effort. But on the positive side, it also creates more choices for us and gives us better products. In the old days (about 1970), the Internet was strictly a text based medium (No Graphics). You connected to it with a very slow (narrowband) dial up modem that ran at about 150-300 bps (that's bits per second, not Kilo-bits per second) and that was the only choice you had. Today, we have many more choices that include, not only how fast do we want to connect to the Internet, but what type of service do we want to use to make that connection. Technically, Broadband defines a connection that can receive data faster than 256 Kbps (Kilo-bits per second). Anything slower than this benchmark is then defined as a Narrowband connection.
(taken from Nielsen//NetRatings and Leichtman Research Group, 2004 data)
Various Things Can Affect Your Access Speed
DSL stands for Digital Subscriber Loop or Digital Subscriber Line. Access to the Internet is through a phone line. Usually the download speed of consumer DSL service is in the range of 256 kbs to 24 Mbps (24,000 kbps). The actual speed depends on several things:
The upload speed is lower than the download speed for ADS (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line), while it is equal to the download speed for SDSL (Symmetric Digital Subscriber Line). Cable Cable Internet service has different problems than DSL. The Internet usage of your neighbors can slow down your cable speed. Cable service uses a shared line for homes in the same area. Overall, cable has more bandwidth, but since you are sharing it with your neighbors, if they are all accessing the Internet at the same time as you, then you will see a noticeable degradation of service. The speed of both cable and DSL can be affected by several things if you have a home network:
Spyware can be another factor that affects your speed on both DSL and Cable. Spyware hides on your computer, collects information, and then uses your Internet connection to send this information back to its creator. Having a lot of spyware can suck the life out of your bandwidth speed, as well as use up processing time to slow down your CPU speed.
Broadband is Winning the Internet Access RaceThe days of dial-up Internet access are starting to fade into the sunset as global demand for broadband booms, according to research firm IDC. High-speed, or broadband, subscriptions will almost double worldwide in five years -- to nearly 400 million in 2010 from about 205 million in 2005 -- fuelled by cheaper prices, increased customer choice and the growth of devices and applications built for the use of broadband, IDC said in a study made public recently. As of March 2006, an estimated 42 percent of Americans (that had Internet connections) had high-speed (broadband) Internet access at home, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. That was up from 30 percent of Americans with high-speed access one year earlier, it said. The cable industry's market share was 57.5 percent while DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) claimed 40.5 percent. (DSL is usually less expensive than cable Internet service but generally offers slower download speeds.) The United States is ranked 12th in the world for broadband subscribers behind countries including Iceland, South Korea and Japan, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's most recent rankings.
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