There is a lot of discussion about broadband, but what is broadband? Really?

Think about it this way: depending on hose diameter and available water pressure, a single garden hose will only deliver about 10.5 gallons of water per minute. You wouldn’t want that kind of limited water output if your house was on fire. However, if you put 25 hoses together you will roughly have the same output as a fire hose. It would be faster because exponentially more water can pass through in the same amount of time.

In the same way, if you take a narrowband Internet connection and increase its width by 25%, you’ll have a marked increase in capacity. You’ll have broadband.

This matters to you because with speeds from 15 megabits per second to 10 gigabits per second, you can power whichever internet resources you need. It gives you the ability to talk on your Voice-Over-IP phone, watch streaming video, backup a large file to the cloud, download your email, and check the latest headlines without stalling your connection.

You want as many gallons per minute as possible when you’re putting out a fire, and you want as many bits per second as possible when doing business with the world around you.

You can check your bandwidth throughput, or speed by clicking here.