DSL, cable and wireless all offer high speed connections to the Internet, but that doesn't mean high speed data throughput.

The Economics (A view from the ISP side)

All DSL, cable and other forms of Internet access are connected to the Internet through a provider. A provider is connected to the Internet by a high speed cable (T1, T3, OC45, etc.).

A T1 costs about $1500 per month and supports a data speed of 1.54 Mb/sec. A T1 supports about 230 dial-up 56K modems. That means that the T1 cost per modem is about $6.50 per month for 230 customers. Now if a cable modem or DSL modem connects to the same T1, it might support 10 such connections before severe degradation is noticed in the download speeds from the Internet. The cost per high speed connection therefore jumps to $150 per month for 10 customers.

Of course the ISP would be out of business selling high speed access at $30 per month when it costs them well over $150 per month. The truth is, there are a whole lot more than 10 high speed connections sharing the Internet provider's link to the Internet.

The Nature of Web Hosting

Almost every web site, but the largest are virtually hosted or share the bandwidth feed. That means that there may be 100 or more web sites sharing a single 1.5 Mb/sec connection to the Internet. Doing the math, that would mean that each web site has about 15 Kb/sec of bandwidth available to it. In real life and on average the Internet runs at about 9 Kb/sec. This is slightly slower than the speed of a 128 kbps modem (the equivalent of two 56K modems).

High Speed Internet Access

High speed Internet access is like having a car that can do 200 miles per hour. If you drive the car late at night or on low use highways you might be able to run at maximum speed for a few minutes until you reach a curve or pot hole. Drive your high speed car in a more congested area or during rush hour and you will be lucky to do more than 40 miles per hour. The Internet works the exact same way. You can great speed from the Internet when it is lightly congested, but hit a congested site and that speed becomes the typical crawl.

What's more a speed limit has come to the Internet. Now more than ever web sites and ftp sites are limiting the download bandwidth to speeds as low as 2.5 Kb/sec (this is equivalent to a 33.6K modem). This has to be done to limit high speed connections from monopolizing their bandwidth when downloading files otherwise people trying to access the site would get a "server too busy" error.

It Will Get Worse Before it Gets Better

High speed Internet access is still only available to about 5% of Internet users. But what happens when that figure doubles or triples? Both the telcos and cable providers have known this problem for years and have looked for ways to capture market share without quickly unrolling the product to everyone all at once. Already cable is experiencing severe slow downs in most high use markets during prime time hours and we can bet DSL will begin to have the same difficulties.

The Band Aid Solution

To overcome these bandwidth limitations the Internet Providers use Proxys (Caches) in front of the Internet connection. Basically these proxys are computers with lots and lots of hard drive space to store all the web sites people have downloaded. That way a popular web site is loaded from this proxy computer rather than going out onto the Internet to get the information. Sounds great until you realize that as high speed Internet access use grows, so does the demand for dynamic web pages that contain video and other multimedia data. Proxys don't handle this type of information to well and the net will be under great pressure to transfer this volume of data.

Connection Speed Vs Data Speed

Connection speed is the speed you connect to the Internet at. Data speed is how fast you receive the data from the Internet. Of the two data speed is much more important than connection speed. No point having a DSL modem if your data speed is that of a 56K modem. Data speed is governed by the Internet and the Internet provider. Connection speed is the maximum speed that you can receive data.

Get What You Paid For

When you go DSL or cable connection shopping ask them what your data speed will be at prime time. Forget the connection speed. The high speed providers charge you for maximum connection speed even though your data speed may be 50-75% less. Log on at 8:30 pm, find a popular MP3 site and download a 10 Mb of data. If your download speed is under 10 Kb/sec you are not getting what you paid for.






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