As the internet becomes more and more humanised, we are finding that websites are getting larger in size as time goes on. This is because more and more features are being added to websites such as Ajax call-backs, larger images and online video etc. All these features give an increased user experience which could not be accomplished without a fast internet connection.

There are still 10% of users in the world that relay on a dial up connection for their online browsing. For these users, some of the newer websites today would give a very poor experience due to the amount of bandwidth needed to load these sites in a short amount of time. For the majority of users dial up is a relatively old technology that they would never revisit.

These users now depend on a broadband connection either Cable or ADSL for their online browsing. Broadband offers much faster speeds not only for browsing but also for downloading files. It’s now possible to download large applications and even movies from the internet in less time than its taken me to write this blog. Due to this a user is almost guaranteed to get the best user experience from website, or so you might think.

If we compare Cable to ADSL you will find they are different in a number of ways and that speed can be affected on each. ADSL comes through the same line that your telephone is connected to. Every area in the UK has a telephone exchange, which basically connects all exchanges together to enable communication. The closer a person is to an exchange the better the speed they will receive. Some ADSL providers offer speeds of up to 24mbps which is very fast but unless you actually live in the exchange you have very little chance of getting close to this.

Cable on the other hand works using UBR’s (universal broadband routers), just like a wireless router you may have at home but much larger and more advanced. The router controls the connection for each user in a specific area. So just like ADSL has exchanges, Cable has UBR’s in regional head ends. The majority of cable runs on fibre optic giving very high speeds with little loss.

At present Cable offers speeds of up to 20mbps in the UK (soon to be 50mbps) which is easily achievable and it doesn’t actually matter how from away you are from the UBR, as distance isn’t an issue. What does affect speed is if too many users are placed on a UBR, this is because each UBR is assigned a specific connection and the more and more users added means that that speed is shared giving less for each.

The UK is still along way behind some of the world leading broadband providers, with Hong Kong offering 1GB connections to residential customers its going to be a while off before we see such speeds. That said, do we really need 1GB connection speeds or are we all in a battle to offer the best broadband speed?