I Feel The Need For Speed!

I feel the need for speed. I recently spent a weekend at Old Town, in Kissimmee FL. Old Town is exactly that, an old section of the town that has been changed to a tourist area, complete with restaurants, bands, and most interesting to me, on Saturday night the town streets are only open to classic cars. But, Old Town also has some amusement rides one of which is two Mustangs on a track. You can drag race your friends to see who has the quicker reaction time off the starting line. The excitement comes though when they hand you your time ticket for the run. In my case, it was elapsed time, two seconds, speed clocked at 109 mph. Zero to 109 mph in two seconds. Unbelievable.

There was a time when computer connections to the Internet were made using a dial up phone line and a 300-baud modem. A baud is a measurement of the number of signaling elements (bits) that occur each second. The term is named after J.M.E. Baudot, the inventor of the Baudot telegraph code. A 300-baud modem transfers 300 bits per second or 300 bps. Different types of modems were developed that allowed multiple bits of information to be passed at the same time, which ultimately brought us where we are today with 56 kbps or 56000 bits per second. Remember, that this rating is the theoretical maximum of the modem. The actual speed is dependent on many things, not least of all being the condition of the phone line. Your modem is most assuredly going to pass data at some speed lower than 56 kbps.
Most dial up internet providers offer some type of “accelerator” sometimes asking a few dollars more per month, but if the theoretical maximum is 56 kbps how can they promote “Up to five times faster?” Can their programmers outsmart the laws of the phone company? The truth leans more towards magic. (Martha, he’s got something up his sleeve.) Magic is based, not on the supernatural, but on misdirection. And in a manner of speaking, that is what the “accelerator” does.

All accelerators use file compression. They take a file that is called for from the Internet and compress the file to a much smaller size. This means it takes less time to appear on your computer. It is still downloaded at 56kbps or less but since much smaller files are downloaded it didn’t take as much time. But even the “five times faster” is a bit like the theoretical limit. It would be nice but probably unreachable because not all files can be compressed. There are two types of compression used by the accelerators. Files such as text files or html files, which need to be identical to the original when they get to your PC use lossless compression. A typical text file can be compressed up to fifty percent and then reassembled when it is displayed on your PC. On the other hand, pictures use lossy compression. For example, take a picture that originally was made up of 2 million colors. After lossy compression it may only have 16 thousand. There may be a loss in quality but it will appear on your screen much faster because you didn’t receive the entire picture.

There are files out there that absolutely cannot be compressed. Things like streaming video, (certainly wouldn’t want to miss the good parts) MP3 music files, and any secure sites, such as banks, shopping carts etc. that use encryption. So these types of files are going to download to from the Internet at their normal pace.
I feel the need for speed. So how does dial up compare to DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) and Cable Internet providers? Remember dial up transfers data at something less than 56 kbps. DSL on the other hand using traditional copper phone lines, but at different frequencies than voice communication can travel up to 1.5 mbps or million bits per second. Technology advances have some DSL providers offering up to 40 mbps. Once again these are theoretical speeds because DSL is distance limited. The further your computer is from the phone company’s central office the slower the connection will be.

I feel the need for more speed. A cable connection is by far the fastest connection available to the average homeowner. As I write this column, my cable connection is downloading data at 22 mbps. Again, technology has advanced to the point where my cable provider advertises download speeds up to 105 mbps (let’s see you top that) or over twice the theoretical limit of DSL and over, well many times the absolute best possible speed of a dial up connection. So just how fast is your Internet connection?

Go to http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest and run the download and upload tests. This site gives you the speed of your Internet connection, compares it to the other forms of connection and weighs it against the average transfer rate for your Internet Service Provider. This site works for dial up, DSL, Cable, Satellite and ISDN connections. If using Comcast/Xfinity go to http://speedtest.comcast.net/ to check your speed and if using Centurylink’s DSL surf over to http://spdtst-dlls.tx.centurylink.net/ to check the download and upload speeds for the service you have. After checking the speed of the connection compare it to the speed advertised for the plan you are paying for. Check speeds at different times of the day for a week or so and if the numbers are way off call the provider. Slow speeds may have many different causes, a bad modem, problems with a router, line shorts, bad connectors, splitters etc. The provider can walk you through some tests that will pinpoint the cause.

Just call me Speedy.

As always, more topics of interest like this one are packed into my book Grumbles From The Keyboard or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love My Computer.  Just click on the Buy Now button to the right or go to amazon.com or barnes and noble.

Grumbles From The Keyboard: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love My Computer