Surfing the Net at 1 Billion Bits Per Second

Posted by Johan Cyprich on 26 Sep 2007 | Tagged as: Technology

Those who have been using the Internet for a while can appreciate the time they graduated from a 56 Kbps modem (Kbps = thousand bits per second) to a cable or DSL connection. From there, the typical speeds started around 1.5 Mbps (MBps = million bits per second). This made downloading large files feasible.

How Fast Is Your Connection?

My Internet provider, Telus, is one of the largest telecommunications companies in Canada and its DSL speeds are 256 Kbps, 1.5 Mbps, 3 Mbps, and 6 Mbps. Its main competitor (Shaw) is offering accounts with 10 Mbps and 25 Mbps. While DSL speeds tend to be more consistent than cable speeds, I found that the download speeds with cable are considerably faster than DSL most of the time.

imageThe graph to the left (which can be enlarged by clicking on it) shows the average broadband speed per country (published by Information Technology and Innovation Foundation).

The results are quite shocking. You would think the United States would have the fastest average connection speeds, but they are 15th on the list. The top 10 are

  1. Japan
  2. Korea
  3. Finland
  4. Sweden
  5. France
  6. Netherlands
  7. Portugal
  8. Canada (woohoo! well, sort of)
  9. Poland
  10. Norway

If your in Hong Kong, you can get 1 Gbps (Gbps = billion bits per second) for $215.40 per month. What would you do with so much speed? If this was too much money to spend, there are less expensive options: 200 Mbps for $88.20 and 100 Mbps for $48.50. They are gradually phasing out their slowest Internet connection speed of 10 Mbps. Their slowest speed is our fastest, most expensive connection here.

Setting Different Priorities

This sort of makes you wonder where our technology is being used. Canada is one of the most wired countries in the world. There are more people in this country who have cable TV than phones and our telecommunications technology is one of the most advanced in the world, yet our Internet connection speeds fall short in comparison to other countries.

America developed a very strong economy from building highways across their nation which allowed goods to be easily and quickly transported. Today, the most important highways are virtual and the nations with the fastest highway bit streams will dominate the future economies. When will our political leaders wake up and see this?



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