Get Connected: All About Broadband

The distinctive chatter of a dial-up modem is rapidly becoming a sound of the past as broadband sweeps the global. It's no mystery why when you consider the enormous benefits:

Broadband operates from 10 to 20 times faster than a dial-up connection, enabling the speedy transfer of large amounts of data. Downloading a typical song takes a few seconds versus perhaps ten minutes with dial-up; e-mailing digital photos is almost instantaneous.

There are lots of money saving broadband deals to be found. For example, If you now dedicate a second phone line for Internet access, you can cancel it. Broadband subscribers usually pay a flat monthly fee, avoiding hourly usage charges. In the long run, it may cost you less for broadband than for a dial-up account.

With broadband you have instant Internet access, 24/7, so you don't have to connect each time you want to go online--you're always connected. This makes it easy to access information when you need it, check your e-mail, and even make phone calls over the Internet. Multiple computers can share a broadband connection, a great feature if family members want to be online at the same time.

Once you have high-speed Internet access, a new world of possibilities opens to you, such as telecommuting, videoconferencing, and Internet telephony. You can also listen to online radio and watch video-on-demand.

While all broadband services make dial-up seem glacial by comparison, not all deliver the same speed. Most broadband services are asymmetric, a fancy term that means that the download speed is faster than the upload speed. But since you will be downloading much more data, such as web pages, music and video, than you will be sending, your download speed is most critical. Depending on the type of service--cable, DSL, satellite or wireless--and other variables, broadband data speed range from 128 Kbps to a screaming 30 Mbps. (Since a three-minute song is about 3 Mb, at the highest speed, you can download it in a fraction of a second--how cool is that?)