You have seen those advertisements on television boasting amazing speed increases for dial-up Internet, or those saying that Cable or DSL is faster. What is the truth? Those claiming to increase dial-up speeds are nothing short of a lie. I’m going to explain the truth, facts and lies that you have been told about both dial-up and broadband.

LIE: The 56KBps modem

It is a 56Kbps modem and is capable of 56Kbps speeds, but dial-up connections are limited to 53Kbps due to a limit imposed on phone lines. A DSL connection uses the phone lines, but is not subject to the same limit. When you buy a 56Kbps modem, you are actually buying a modem which will connect you at 53Kbps or less.

Most actual ISP connections are between 36Kbps and 48Kbps according to what I saw in my time working for an internet service provider. It requires near ideal conditions to connect and transfer files at 53KBps.

At 48Kbps it would take you about 10-15 minutes to download a single three minute song. If you want to watch a YouTube video, you might as well click and go have lunch while the video loads. One of the major benefits of broadband is that the connections are so fast that you can watch streaming videos almost instantly with no interruption.

LIE: We offer dial-up 5x faster with our accelerator software!

Internet service providers have advertised ways to increase dial-up speeds which are physically impossible. They just word it in a way that it will hold up in court and sounds good.The claim is that you can simply install software and browse ten times faster. No software can change the speed limits imposed on phone lines and increase speeds ten times. It requires a broadband connection to browse faster than 53KBps.

What the software actually does in most cases that I’ve heard of is “cache” websites. The first time you visit that website it will not load any faster, but once your there the website is saved to files on your hard drive and the next time you return it may load quicker by retrieving the files on your hard drive. This doesn’t work very well. You will never see in increase in speed when revisiting YouTube to watch a new video that you want to see. Cache is usually temporary and although the software may hold the cache longer, this serves no useful purpose and takes up space. Even though this method does make a slight difference, your Internet browser already does this for you. If your offered a faster dial-up connection, you shouldn’t have to pay more for this service.

If you do not have dialup and have DSL or Cable you may or may not notice a difference between those two if you switch between one or the other. Available speeds are determined by your location, your ISP, the amount of traffic the site you are visiting is experiencing and the available bandwidth that site has available. Unless you are using massive amounts of bandwidth to download large files from multiple locations you typically won’t see less than top notch performance.

Usually the truth: Cable is much faster than DSL.

It is true that cable is twice as fast as DSL. In ideal conditions cable blows DSL away. Though, again if you aren’t using lots of bandwidth you may not notice the difference and can choose DSL or Cable depending on availability and price.

In my area Bellsouth offers 1.5Mbps download speeds for about $49.95 and Cable offers 5Mbit download speeds for $49.95 (the first 6 months is $29.95 for new customers). Bellsouth has a “Lite-DSL” offer for about half the price of it’s standard DSL. I’m not sure if Time Warner has a similar offer. It all depends on your location since Time Warner and Bellsouth’s (or other broadband service providers) prices and service differ by location.

An important factor in DSL and cable speed is the distance between you and the local Telco office. If you are too far away, this may be a factor in whether or not the service is available to you at all. If you are experiencing problems with one service, try switching to another as you may be closer to the competitors telco office and get better service.

Not usually true: MySpace is really slow right now. My connection sucks!

The major problem with this statement is that MySpace is one of the most visited websites on the Internet and gets hit very hard. It simply can not contend with the number of visitors and the bandwidth required to support it. It’s also a very poorly designed site, causing problems for everyone. It probably has nothing to do with your computer or the Internet. The website just simply can not handle the load. This doesn’t prove that there isn’t a problem with your connection though, so you should try several other sites such as Google to see if the site you’re having trouble with is experiencing problems. This goes for any site you have problems with. Try a couple of others first.

When you connect to anything on the Internet you are actually connecting to more than one server to reach the target. We call these “hops”. A connection problem or heavy load may exist on one of those hops from your home to the server thousands of miles away. So if one of those hops is very slow then that site will be too.

Another factor is that anyplace you connect to on the Internet has limited bandwidth. It will spread that bandwidth out to each connection. When more connections are made, each individual connection will have less available bandwidth to use. Due to this things get slower for you when load increases.

TRUTH: You can download a 4.5 minute song in 7.2 seconds with cable.

In my area Time Warner offers about a 5Mbit cable connection. So I can download files at 625K per second which is blazing fast. I can download a four and a half minute song in about 7.2 seconds. Although, it isn’t that simple. There aren’t a lot of people or websites out there that allow one person to receive a file that fast. So in most cases you will probably see between 40K/sec and 200K/sec download speeds. If you are downloading a file from a friend, private Internet connections have much less bandwidth available for uploading so it is even slower to receive a file from another person directly. If you were to receive a file from a friend, usually you will receive that file at about 20-45K a second, so you a 4.5 minute song would take about two and a half minutes.

There is actually a bright side. You may only be able to receive one file from your friend at 45K/sec, but you could begin downloading that file then start downloading another file from another location at for example, 90K/sec and you would not see a speed reduction in your original download. That is because if you have a connection that is allowed 625K/sec download speeds, you have a lot of bandwidth to spare. So while download a file at 45K/sec from one location and 90K/sec from another you still have enough bandwidth available for downloads up to 490K/sec. Though keep in mind if you manage to max out your bandwidth and then decide to browse the web it may be very slow.

TRUTH: “Lite” versions of DSL and Cable are fast enough for most people.

Yes, this is true, because as I said before you most likely will not max out the bandwidth available to you. Lite versions of these services provide more than enough bandwidth for most people. If you think that the Lite version is not enough, try standard Cable or DSL to see if your connection improves.

To get a good idea of how fast your connection really is, visit speedtest.net. Don’t do this while downloading any files or browsing the web as it will not give you a good reading. Most of the time it is very accurate. When it is done it will provide you with lots of useful information.