I currently have AT&T dial up and connect at 40,000 bps, and will soon be switching to sprints cable which is 1.5 mbps. How much faster will this be? I was thinking 3 times faster, so a page that would take normally 9 seconds to load because of dial up will take roughly 3 seconds using cable?

Can someone clear this up for me

 

1,500,000 divided by 40,000 = 37.5

That's purely theoretical though. It is very rare to get the actual rated connection speed with any form of broadband. IMO, you probably shouldn't bank on getting any more than 60-80% of the rated speed at any given time.

BTW - You said "Sprint's cable." Do you mean DSL? I didn't know sprint offerred cable modem connections. If it is indeed cable, 1.5 mbs is pretty darned slow in this day and age. I think most cable modem connections are usually rated at 6-12 mbs now days.

 

8 mbs is pretty common for DSL.....

T3 (etc.) > Cable > DSL > ISDN > Dialup > Stealing neighbors wireless connection

 

fyi 10 mbps and 10 Mbps are totally different units.

 

1.5 mbps sounds more like DSL to me.

It'll be far more responsive (in theory) and faster than dialup

 

They said its cable, but now im unsure. They are giving me free wireless *things* to connect it through my usb port. You can use the phone while online and have different people on the same connection. Sprint-Embarq, is providing the service for $25 month.

 

Fortunately, I get to work in the world of the practical. Refresh my memory on the m/M.

 

Megabytes per second vs megabits per second...

 

I believe this is the website Click here

 

I just went from SBC Yahoo DSL to Comcast today and the difference is really noticable. Having DSL was the worst experience ever.

 

 

Cant be any worse than Dial up

 

Mbps = megabits per second
MBps = megabytes per second

1 MBps = 8 Mbps

 

I have never heard of the "m" being the distinction between bits and bytes. I have always seen that difference as Mbps/MBps.

BTW, I think all of this is acadmic. If I'm not mistaken, the "official" spec for network data transfer rates is listed as "Mbit/s".

EDIT: Badboy, you just contradicted your own response to Whiskers.

 

It is 1.5M, what ever that is.

 

uh, yeah that's correct but there's no such thing as a milli bit per sec.

Remember,

m - milli but often misquoted as mega
M - mega
b - bit
B - byte

so

10Mbps = 10 Mega bits per sec
10mbps = 10 milli bits per sec (no such thing so we default to "mega")
10MBps = 10 megabytes per sec (i wish!)

You probably meant to say 10Mbps and 10MBps are totally different units.

Even with all this superfast connections, even if you had a T3 or an OC192 (drool) the bottleneck for downloading fast is your hard drive. Can it write that fast? and if it could is your CPU able to process info that fast? if not you'll never achieve the full speed it's rated at.

End networking 101's pre-requisite class.

 

I realized I made a mistake, learned that in school and that was a long time ago.

I corrected myself in my last post. What whiskers said is still correct though.

Yes, when dealing with network data transfer numbers, the standard is using Mbps, and when dealing with mass storage MBps is used.

 

So is 1.5M only *AT MOST* 37.5 times faster than 40k dial up?

 

You are right, I corrected myself just in the nick of time.

 

Why do I have the overwhelming feeling that we're all cast members in an episode of "Nerd Sesame Street."

 

 

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