For me, it seems like just yesterday that I began learning about the World Wide Web, sometime in the mid-1990’s. Though there had been networks of computers within research institutions and defense agencies, access was restricted. But on August 23, 1991 CERN opened its network to the public, establishing the World Wide Web.
In the beginning, the computer was connected to the telephone jack in my home office and we were riding the web at 14.4 kbps (kilo bits per second), BANDWIDTH.
Th Hidden Network that makes the internet possible.
In 2012, a team of researchers set a world record, transmitting 1 petabit of data— that's 10,000 hours of high-def video— over a fifty-kilometer cable, in a second. This wasn't just any cable. It was a souped-up version of fiber optics, the hidden network that links our planet and makes the internet possible. What is fiber optics and how does it work? Sajan Saini explores the vital technology.
In October of 1969, four leading US universities — University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Stanford Research Institute (SRI), University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) and the University of Utah — activated a project known as the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), creating the first successful network of computers in a time when computers barely interacted with their users, let alone one another.
This historic connection provided the basis for the Internet as we know it today. Over the nearly five decades since ARPANET’s debut, computer networking has evolved to a level beyond even the loftiest dreams of those who created it.
The next time you shoot a quick email to a friend and send it winging through the electronic ether, consider this: the first message ever sent on a network consisted of just two letters.
The message was meant to read, “LOGIN,” but the network only managed to transmit two letters before the whole system crashed. Not a very auspicious beginning for a system that would one day support 297 billion emails every single day.
Even the enormous amount of data created by email is but an eddy in the raging river of data that surges through the modern internet
https://www.whoishostingthis.com/blog/2013/06/17/internet-then-and-now/
The Internet has become an important part of many people’s lives. In fact, so many of us have become so accustomed to high speed Internet connections that we often forget the days of struggling to get a solid 14.4 kbps connection over our telephone lines. And for younger people, those days never existed.
They always had access to DSL, cable, and satellite as well as mobile devices that are even faster and more capable than entire computers were decades ago. How has the Internet connection we have come to depend on evolved over the years?
https://www.americanis.net/2014/brief-history-internet-connection/
https://www.wired.com/2010/05/0526bill-gates-internet-memo/ (The complete memo)
“In the next 20 years the improvement in computer power will be outpaced by the exponential improvements in communications networks. The combination of these elements will have a fundamental impact on work, learning and play. Great software products will be crucial to delivering the benefits of these advances. Both the variety and volume of the software will increase.”
“A combination of expanded access to the Internet, ISDN, new broadband networks justified by video-based applications and interconnections between each of these will bring low cost communication to most businesses and homes within the next decade.”
“In this memo I want to make clear that our focus on the Internet is crucial to every part of our business. The Internet is the most important single development to come along since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981. It is even more important than the arrival of the graphical user interface (GUI).”
Answer: Kbps stands for "kilobits per second," (1,000 bits), while Mbps stands for "megabits per second." Because one megabit is equal to 1,000 kilobits, 1 Mbps, (1,000,000 bits), is 1000 times faster than 1 Kbps.
Important: The lowercase "b" in Kbps and Mbps means "bit," not byte. One byte is equal to eight bits. For example, 2 MBps (2 million Bytes per second), equals 16 Mbps (16 million bits per second).
https://pc.net/helpcenter/answers/kbps_or_mbps_faster
This is a small semantic difference, but it makes a large difference when measuring data. Data transfer rates are typically measured in bits, while data storage capacity is usually measured in bytes.
Since then, the internet has grown up quite a bit. In 2016, residential cable connection speeds are topping out at 2 Gbps. To understand how large that growth is, we’ve put together a handy graph that helps put these internet speeds into perspective.
The term bandwidth has a number of technical meanings but since the popularization of the internet, it has generally referred to the volume of information per unit of time that a transmission medium (like an internet connection) can handle.
An internet connection with a larger bandwidth can move a set amount of data (say, a video file) much faster than an internet connection with a lower bandwidth.
Bandwidth is typically expressed in bits per second, like 60 Mbps or 60 Mb/s, to explain a data transfer rate of 60 million bits (megabits) every second.
It's easy to dismiss bandwidth as a technology term that doesn't really apply to you unless you like to play around with tech products or set up internet hardware. In reality, learning what bandwidth means and how it applies to your own network can help you tweak your setup to get a faster internet connection when you need it.
You might be curious about bandwidth if your internet connection is suddenly slower than it is most days. Maybe you suspect that you should buy more bandwidth or that you're not getting what you're paying for.
Or, maybe you're about to buy a gaming console or video streaming service and need an accurate understanding of whether or not you can do so without it negatively impacting the rest of your network. For most people, those two activities are by far the biggest bandwidth hoggers.
Over 4 billion internet users as I write this. Over 118 billion emails sent by (11:18am PST USA, 7/05/2019). That’s around 1 billion emails sent per hour since 12:01am PST USA. Incredible! You owe it to yourself to check it out, you will be amazed at to how muchinformation they are collecting on us.
https://www.internetlivestats.com/
by Tim Fisher Updated June 24, 2019
See How to Test Your Internet Speed for help on how to accurately determine how much bandwidth you have available to you. Internet speed test sites are often, but not always, the best way to do that.
https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-test-your-internet-speed-2617987
How much bandwidth you need depends on what you plan on doing with your internet connection. For the most part, more is better, constrained, of course, by your budget.
In general, if you plan on doing nothing but Facebook and the occasional video watching, a low-end high-speed plan is probably just fine.
If you have a few TVs that will be streaming Netflix, and more than a few computers, tablets, and other devices that might be doing who-knows-what, I'd go with as much as you can afford. You won't be sorry.
https://www.lifewire.com/what-is-bandwidth-2625809
by Tim Fisher
Updated June 24, 2019
https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-test-your-internet-speed-2617987
Updated July 01, 2019
https://www.lifewire.com/speed-up-your-internet-access-2377440
Fast and reliable Internet access can make all the difference between a good and an excruciating web experience. If you have mission-critical work to do from home, fast internet access is even more important. Get the most from your internet service at home with these tips.