These days there are more options for high speed internet than ever before. But with such a rich variety of connection options to choose from, it can be difficult to tell them apart and choose the perfect type of internet for you. Have no worries, though. With this guide, you’ll never again be in the dark when it comes to high speed internet.
Broadband internet confuses a lot of people who think that it is its own form of connection separate from cable and dial-up. But it is actually kind of a blanket term for any kind of internet connection that isn’t dial-up. That’s right: Cable, satellite, fiber-optic and any other connection that doesn’t use dial-up falls within this category. So now that that’s taken care of, let’s look at the two leading forms of high speed internet.
This type of internet connection is known as a Digital Subscriber Line and it is further divvied up into several different types including ADSL, SDSL, HDSL, and VDSL. ADSL is the most popular version, but all of them work in the same basic way: They use your phone line to connect to the internet. But this is no mere dial-up connection. With a digital subscriber line, the extra bandwidth not used by your phone is dedicated to providing an internet connection that still allows you to use your phone even when on the internet. What’s more, this type of connection is among the fastest and most dependable out there right now and is only trumped by cable. But whereas cable can exceed the speed of a digital subscriber line, it isn’t always faster in practice, depending on where you live. In addition, many homes are not able to install cable and thus this is their best option for an internet connection.
This is one of the fastest growing types of high speed internet available and for a simple reason: Under normal circumstances, you simply can’t beat cable’s quick speed. With a cable internet connection, the modem can pull around thirty Mbps of bandwidth, almost three times faster than the regular DSL connection. But cable has a few shortcomings, as mentioned earlier. For one, many parts of the country (especially rural areas) are not set up with cable connections and must use one of the other options. Also, cable is only faster than other broadband setups when there is not too much traffic from other users of the same service.