We all hear the ISP ads bragging about how fast the service is.  What's the truth behind these ads?

Advertised performance speed may be nowhere near reality. So what should you choose?  DSL? Cable? Fiber optic?  The answer depends on what you are doing on the net.

If you are Web browsing or sending and receiving emails any broadband will deliver acceptable speed.  If your internet usage consists more of downloading large files or streaming you need greater speed.  Regardless of the speed many companies advertise nothing compares with the speed of basic DSL.

You can check the speed of your current provider by using one of the many speed testing programs available on the net. But be aware that different programs test in different ways so provide differing results.

Internet speed is measured in bits.  A bit is a basic unit of data.   It is a digital one or zero.  Bit is abreviated "b".   Approximately 10 bits are needed to transmit a single character of data, called a byte. Multiples of bits are measured with the initial "K", which stands for "kilo" (1,000 in Greek) or the initial "M", which stands for "mega" (Greek for 1 million).  Thus an advertised speed of 528Kbps means that 528,000 bits of data per second are traveling from your ISPs server to your computer.  An ISP advertising 4Mbps is delivering 4 million bits per second from its server to your computer.  Note that upload speeds are typically slower than download speeds.

Basic DSL service typically operates at a speed of 768 Kbps.

Why aren't you getting the speed your ISP advertises?  Because the speed advertised is the maximum the network is set up to deliver a single file from a server to a receiving computer on the same network. 

But this isn't how the Internet works in a real world.  The real world Net is huge and complex with millions of highways and byways that are slower than your ISP's network.  Data is routed through millions of servers that handle millions of user requests every second.  Your data travels only as fast as the slowest link in the server chain.  If one of the servers in the chain is receiving too many requests or operates too slowly information will be slowed down getting to and from your computer.  So you could be paying a premium price for 8Mbps of download capacity but if your information is bogged down by a server, somewhere along the line, that works at only 200 Kbps your information will be transmitted much more slowly.

Web browsing is far more complex than emailing or downloading music. A web page is a coded text file.  The code tells your browser how the page is to be displayed.  It dictates where images, text, graphics, and other components are placed and at what size they are to be displayed.  In the same manner your computer sends information it also receives information from other servers.  Again, your speed is only as fast as the slowest server.  As far as Web browsing is concerned, your ISP's maximum speed is virtually meaningless.

There are also internal components that alter your Web browsing speed including the speed of your and your computer's processor and graphics adapter in decoding and displaying Web images.

Your ISP is likely to allow you to download large files, like high resolution images or music, more rapidly than uploads. 

There are many sites where you can test your ISP's speed.  One such site is BroadbandReports.com. This site offers several browser based plug-ins that test your ISP's speed by downloading and uploading medium to large files from several servers. 

Above is Cumby's DSLtest result run on
BroadbandReports.comthe day this article was written.