So weve finally left the era of the Internet crawling along, taking forever to load anything weve entered the high speed age, where we can rely on the net to be there and get us the information we want, and quickly. Home internet connections today can be ridiculously fast they start at 256K, and go all the way up to 30Mb in some places.
If youre not quite sure what I just said, then it might be time for a quick broadband crash course. Basically, broadband works by taking your phone line (or your cable, or some other communication method), and transmitting many different signals over it at the same time. So once a line has been adapted to broadband standards, more data can fit through it. The amount of data that can get through each second is measured in bits, specifically kilobits (K, meaning a thousand bits) and megabits (Mb, a million bits).
You should note at this point, however, that there are 8 bits in a byte. That means that your 8Mb broadband connection translates into an actual download speed of 1MB (megabyte) per second. This means that the average 5MB song would take you about 5 seconds to download, and the average 700MB movie would take just over ten...