Comparing High Speed Internet Promotions
Are you shopping around for high speed internet and getting totally confused? $12.95 for 6 months, or $14.95 for 3 months? Upload speeds of 128 kbps or download speeds of 768 kbps? What does kbps stand for anyway? Hopefully this article will help you make some sense of all the promotions out there.
I compared the promotions (as of May 2006) being offered by most of the primary DSL and cable modem providers in Southern California. It's hard to fit a giant Excel spreadsheet into a text article, but see if you can use the information I provide to at least try to compare apples to apples. The two main criteria I focused on are price and speed.
A few points to clear up first so you can be more educated in your choices:
| kbps | kilobits per second |
|---|---|
| mbps | stands for megabits per second. A megabit is 1,000 times faster than a kilobit. So 1.5 megabits is equal to 1,500 kilobits. |
| download speed | The download speed is for downloading web pages, software, etc. and is what you probably use most of the time. |
| upload speed | The upload speed is used, for example, when you might upload photos to the internet (for instance to Snapfish or sending an attachment to an email), or if you have your own website and upload your own pages. |
Since you are only downloading most of the time, high speed internet companies focus primarily on download speeds, which are invariably faster than upload speeds. You might want to focus primarily on downoad speeds as well, depending on your type of usage of course.
Also, the general consensus is that the typical download speed for home DSL (before all these promotions started coming out recently) is about 1.5 kbps. So it is worth a word of caution that the cheapest promotions may or may not be the best for you.
Several companies are offering very good prices for 768 kbps of download speed. I have been told that this speed is adequate for people who mainly use email and do light web surfing. So you have to think about how much you use the internet. Do you download music? Are you a web surfing addict?
One thing I'll tell you is that if I, as a computer consultant, had an internet speed of 768 kbps, I'd probably be rather uphappy. But if you're a light user, you'd probably be fine.
OK, now you can read about the different offers and prices for DSL and Cable Modem, and see for yourself: