Faster internet for better performance

Think of Internet speed like water pressure in a tap. If you are only getting a trickle, you may be able to brush your teeth and fill the kettle, but it certainly wouldn’t be worth your while to try and water your garden. Or put the washing machine on.

Just as strong water pressure delivers a higher volume of water in a shorter period, a faster Internet connection will deliver more information in a shorter time.

So, while you actually could try and water your garden with trickle pressure, it would take all day. It’s the same with the Internet. You could try and stream your favourite Netflix series one frame at a time, but the constant buffering would make the experience frustrating.

That is why understanding Internet speed is important. It is about ensuring that you subscribe to a service that has the speed that gives you the Internet experience you want!

Internet speed is measured by identifying how many bits or bytes (the term for units of information) are transferred in one second.

Because these units are so small, metric-based prefixes are used to describe them as follows:

• Kilo for 1,000 kilobits or kilobytes per second (KBps or Kbps)
• Mega for 1 million megabits or megabytes per second (MBps or Mbps)
• Giga for 1 billion gigabits or gigabytes per second (Gbps or GBps)

Most Internet upload speeds are expressed in Mbps, while the slower uploads are measured in Kbps.