Archive for the ‘Broadband’ Category
Choosing the Right Valves to Keep the Data Flowing
There is an old saying that “Knowledge is power.” If that’s true then the power of all the knowledge contained on the internet could level mountains. Or if we look at it as an ocean of knowledge, perhaps it’s more accurate to say the rivers of the internet could carve out the Grand Canyon in a matter of minutes if released all at once.
Of course there are several practical limits on how much of that knowledge you can access at once, not the least of which is your own brain power. The key to maximizing the power from the released potential is the same as it is with the Hoover dam. Control the flow of water from the vast reservoir and release as much as you can convert to power at any given time. In the Grand Canyon, the Hoover Dam holds back the waters and valves control how much water is let through to turn the great turbines that convert the water’s stored potential into electrical power.
In the case of the internet, your broadband speed is the valve that controls the maximum flow rate of data to your computer. Unfortunately, with the amount of data sloshing around the internet, the valves are often too small to keep our turbines spinning as fast as they can. When our turbines stop spinning that means we are waiting… and waiting… and waiting for a download to finish before we can view the file we’ve requested.
To keep our turbines spinning and converting all that available information to power, we need to choose the valves with capacity to deliver what we need, when we need it. That means comparing all the available broadband suppliers in our area. For internet users in the UK, a website called Broadband.co.uk helps make that easy. The site allows UK visitors to input their postcode and view a list of every broadband supplier that provides service in their area.
Not only does Broadband.co.uk provide comparison charts of all the stated speeds, prices, and download data limits of every major broadband service provider in the UK, but they also let visitors check the size of their exiting valves with a tool that measures both the download and upload speed of each visitor’s current connection. Using the aggregation of this data, Broadband.co.uk supplies monthly charts listing the actual measured connection speeds of ten of the most popular internet providers in the UK.
With the information provided by broadband.co.uk we can all choose the right valves to keep the data flowing at speeds that maximize our internet experience and provide that service at the cost that’s right for us, too.