What does all this Internet Lingo Mean? We will start with basics of 1 mbps of speed.  Network bandwidth or network speeds are measured in bits per second.  On the other hand, data is measured in bytes.  It takes 8 bits to equal 1 byte.

 So 1 mbps is equal to 1 million bits. So if you were to download a 1MB file on a 1 mbps connection it would take approximately 8 seconds to download.  1 megabit is 1/8 of 1 megabyte of data or 0.125MB.  So technically internet speed  is not really the speed of the connection but the amount of data delivered per second.   So think of internet speeds as lanes on a freeway and everyone is traveling at 60 mph(1 second).  Think of 1 lane as 1 mbps and 1 car is 0.125MB of data. So one lane of data can deliver 0.125 MB of data in a given amount of time and in our case 1 second.  So 8mbps or 8 lanes on a freeway can deliver 8x 0.125=1MB of data a second. The higher the mbps the more data that can be delivered per second to make things like web browsing or video streamings seem to load faster, as more amount of data is being delivered per second to display the content you are requesting.  Hopefully we didnt lose you. Basically the higher the mbps speed package the faster the internet will feel or the more devices you can have hooked up without having to many slow downs.

Up To Speeds

          Most Isp's offer residential internet as a best effort service, like us, vs a dedicated internet service which can cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars a month. Best effort meaning every effort is made to deliver the selected bandwidth package but during peak times or unusually high usage times it is possible you may not recieve 100% of your package. Bandwidth maybe slightly lower during these peak times as equal bandwidth sharing mechanisms may kick in during this hour or two when peak usage happens to keep latency low.  But most ISP's can monitor this and make any necessary adjustments to the network or upgrades to help with this issue.  We have monitoring system in place that tracks Quality of Experience and bandwidth output of every Access Point we have in service and gives us an overall performance metric so we can ID an area we need to address.

Line of Sight

          Line of Sight means we have line of sight to our tower or Access Point.  This allows us to use a much faster technology to deliver bandwidth to your home. 

Upload and Download

        When ever you browse websites or watch videos you are primarily using you download to receive this content. Download would be coming from the internet to your device.  To make an request for example entering a website name and pressing enter it sends the request out your upload out to the server to make the request to receive its content. Or if you send pictures to Facebook, cloud storage or upload videos to a website you are using you upload of you internet connection.