Broadband Guide: Download Speeds, Fair Usage, Hubs & Capping Explained

Broadband means a high speed internet connection and has become the most popular way to connect a computer to the internet. It has almost completely replaced the much slower dial-up method connected to a phone line. Broadband is always online and does not interfere with telephone use.

The Uses of Broadband

When a computer is connected to the internet, users can access email, websites, social networking programmes and purchase almost anything from a gift card to a truck or house. Users can also watch live TV on their computers, listen to radio, download music and movies, play games, do banking, chat and speak to friends anywhere in the world and many more things.

Broadband make this all possible because it allows a lot of information to transfer from the internet to the computer very fast. With slow dial-up connections it takes a long time to download a movie and during that time there may be no space for doing anything else on the computer.

A broadband connection comes into the home through a fixed telephone line from BT or from a Virgin Media cable connection. The telephone line has Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) technology that enables data to be transmitted faster over conventional copper telephone lines. Virgin Media has a fibre optic cable network throughout half of the UK. For residents in these areas, this is the fastest internet option.

There is also mobile broadband that uses mobile phone technology. It is not the best option for large downloads but is useful for surfing the net and accessing email when not at home.

Download Speeds

Companies that provide broadband always emphasize the speeds they offer in their different packages. The price of the package generally goes up when the speed offered increases. The most standard speed is up to 8Mb or megabits per second, but there are services that offer 50Mb and 100Mb also available in some areas.

Eight megabits equal one megabyte (MB) and this is important to know when choosing a broadband package, because large files such as movies, photographs and songs are measured in megabytes per second. Download allowances are also described in MBs. Remember, Mb describes broadband speed and MB or gigabytes GB describes file size and download caps.

Download Caps

Download caps will limit the amount of data downloaded from the internet monthly. These caps usually only affect those who download large files such as movies or games and are on the internet most of the day and night.

Broadband caps limit the amount of data that can be downloaded for a given period of time. Some caps apply to surfing the web as well as downloading large programmes or files.

Caps are often set by mobile broadband suppliers. Mobile broadband accounts offer a set amount of data and charge extra for going over the limit or cap. For contracts, the allotted amount begins fresh every month. For pay-as-you-go accounts, the cap applies to the amount of time purchased.

Fair Usage

Fair usage is a policy that tries to make downloading time fair for everyone on the same network. If one member begins to download a very large file during peak times of the day, the speed of the broadband connection will become slow for the other people on the network. Fair usage mainly applies to unlimited broadband packages.

Broadband providers add a clause to their unlimited contracts that ask users not to hog the bandwidth. This is supposed to keep the cyber traffic down and avoid slowing the connections. However, there is not a clear definition of a bandwidth hog, so one company’s hog may not be another company’s hog.

Most home broadband connections have a contention ratio of 50:1. This means that there are 50 computers on the same connection. If one of them regularly downloads very large files, it could regularly slowdown 49 other users. They will complain to the internet service provider (ISP) and the ISP may decide to do something about the person hogging the connection.

Hubs

A network hub is just like the hub of a wheel. It is the centre of a local area network (LAN). Whenever two or more computers are connected by a network a LAN is created. For businesses, government offices and other places where many people need access to the same data, hubs are vital. They can also be very useful in a home when family members have different computers and need to share a printer, internet connection, files or a scanner.

Ethernet wire is the cable that links the computers together so they can communicate with each other. Each computer on the LAN will have a Network Interface Card (NIC) where the Ethernet wire is connected with a plug. These are built into most computers but can be added. The actual networking hub is a box that serves as a junction and has several places in the back where the computers on the LAN can connect.