I want to look at the kinds of connections Internet users have. For years the only way to connect to the Internet for the home user was through a dial-up modem, which topped out at a mere 56K. However, with the recent (last several years) propagation of so-called "high-speed Internet," is speed even a concern anymore? How fast is "high-speed" Internet? Can I make my files as big as I want now?
Over 90 percent of Americans have "high-speed" or broadband Internet. That is, of all Americans who have a home Internet connection, over 90 percent of those connections are broadband. If you count people who access the Internet outside of their homes (work, public library, etc.) the percentage is even higher. Ok, so it seems like even if a web designer turns out a site that would take an hour to load over dial-up, he's only alienating 10 percent of Internet users, right? Well, that depends on the definition of "broadband."
A quick note: Internet speed are measured in the number of bits per second the connection can transfer. This can be confusing since most computer files are measured in bytes, not bits. Since a byte is 8 bits, it would take 8 bits per second to transfer one byte per second. So 1 megabit per second only transfers 1/8 of a megabyte per second. Bits are abbreviated with a lowercase letter b, and bytes use an uppercase B. So a kilobit is Kb, while a kilobyte is KB.
Broadband is defined in different ways by different entities. For example, the FCC labels as broadband anything faster than 768 Kbps. However for marketing purposes, broadband usually means "greater than 56 Kbps," that is a connection that transfers more than 56 kilobits per second. 56Kbps is of course the maximum speed at which dial-up can operate; a broadband connection is anything faster than dial-up. Therefore, we have to look at how users are actually connecting.
In the United States, cable is the most popular broadband connection, with DSL trailing right behind. Outside the US, DSL is in the lead. Cable Internet usually offers downloads speed between two and ten Mbps, which is pretty fast. DSL ranges from 256 Kbps to 24 Mbps. 24 Mbps is fast, but 256 Kbps is not. It's five times faster than dial-up, but if you can even compare something with dial-up, it's slow.
Satellite Internet is often used in areas where cable and DSL are not available. The bandwidth available is about on par with DSL, although there is a longer latency because of the distance the signal must travel (from earth to orbit and back). The other option for users in this situation is mobile broadband. These devices work by receiving signals from cell phone towers. However, in an Edge network, (which covers most of the United States) the transfer rate is only two or three times faster than dial-up. Even the faster 3G network only operates at the lower limits of cable Internet.
To put this into practical terms, if a page has 1 MB of data (including the HTML and CSS files, all images and media) it will theoretically take 146 seconds to download over a 56 K dial-up connection. That's 56 Kilobits/second times about 18 seconds is one Mb, times 8 to equal one MB. However, a 1 Mb connection will download in only 8 seconds. Move to a 10 Mb connection, and you're looking at less than a second of download time.
So how fast is "high-speed" Internet? As I've said before, I've yet to see a connection that was too fast. Broadband is fast enough for most websites, but only because optimization is still a concern. If optimization is foregone, the website may very well be too.
