Six Things You Don't Know about Broadband! (2) 

Do you know broadband?

You may answer yes. I know you may have tried broadbands from several broadband ISPs. You may have installed broadband by yourself several times. You know broadband speed - 2Mb, 8Mb or 24 Mb. You may understand the monthly usage and control your usage. But if you are not a technician in that area, you may not know everything behind these numbers. There are something broadband ISPs will not tell you, or try to write it in a shady corner on their web page.

Let me tell you all these things:

Connection Rate:

From the previous article, we know the actually speed broadband ISPs provide to us. However, there is another bad news - you may have to share the bandwidth with other 49 people. So in Internet rush hour, the real speed may be slow down to 160 Kb a second, that is 20 KB per second.

Wonder why? because there is a connection rate for broadband! few broadband ISPs tell customers its connection rate on a explicit place on the web site. But it does affect the speed a lot.

So what is connection rate? Connection rate shows the number of users who share the bandwidth on a single broadband connection between your local exchange and your broadband ISP. Normally, the connection ratios are 50:1 and 20:1.

In UK, the connection rate for home broadband is 50:1, which means you would likely to share your bandwidth with 49 other users, of course, never more than that number. The connection ratio for business broadband is 20:1. It will be much faster in Internet rush hour. 

See also:

Six Things You Don't Know about Broadband! (1)

Six Things You Don't Know about Broadband! (3)

Six Things You Don't Know about Broadband! (4)

Six Things You Don't Know about Broadband! (5)

Six Things You Don't Know about Broadband! (6)