Cutting The Cord - Part 5

Having exposed BANDWIDTH as the scarce resource that can make or break your Internet television viewing experience, a number of readers wrote to me asking for a “simple” explanation of what bandwidth is, and as one person asked, “How do I get it and how can I tell that I have it?”

I apologize. Let’s drop back and talk about bandwidth – what it is, how you get it, and how you can tell when you have it.

I think the best comparison can be made to the plumbing in your house. You can’t build a house using tiny ¼-inch tubing to supply water to your sinks, toilets, bathtubs, and showers. Technically, you would have water service everywhere you’d need it – but imagine how long it would take to fill your tub! And how unsatisfying a shower would be with just a trickle of hot water. Not to mention what would happen if you were taking a shower and someone flushed the toilet.

For obvious reasons, most building codes specify that you use a certain size pipe for your residential water supply. Would your municipal water company use the same size pipe to supply all the houses in your neighborhood? No. You’re more likely to find a much larger diameter pipe supplying your entire neighborhood.

Bandwidth is the flow of digital information that originates somewhere in the Internet and ends at your doorstep. How much can flow to your home is a matter of how big a pipe you have. You can have a trickle of bandwidth, or a gusher. Your Internet service provider (called an ISP) will charge you based on how much flow it makes available to you, whether you use it or not.

Your ISP measures bandwidth in terms of “millions of bits per second” or Mbps. By the Federal Communications Commission’s definition, you have BROADBAND if your ISP is capable of delivering at least 3Mbps of bandwidth (flow) down to your home. Their requirement for “uploading” to the Internet is a much slower 0.768Mbps. When watching Internet television, it’s the download speed that concerns you.

Bandwidth is a shared resource, so If you have two people consuming it in your home, each of you may have an average of only 1.5MBps (just a trickle of bandwidth). If you purchase 7Mbps bandwidth as I do, that’s likely to be the most flow you’ll get – when other people in your home shut of their devices and, possibly, when other people in your neighborhood aren’t watching Internet television.

How can you tell how much bandwidth is available at your home or business? Simple. Turn on your computer and browse to http://www.speedtest.net/. Click on the BEGIN TEST button, sit back and watch.

Just for fun, reply to this post with the download speed available at your home. Should be interesting.

(To be continued…)