One of the features people get for their homes today is internet connectivity. There are many reasons for which Internet connections are needed in homes today. The reasons range from, but not limited to running a smart home, watching movies, playing games, and internet activities among others. Internet speed is one of the many factors that you should consider before settling for an Internet service provider.
Since it is mostly telecom companies that provide us with Internet service, you should see different US telecom companies in the USA by reading about them on US-Reviews. From the reviews, you will get an idea of the Internet speed to expect from using their services. This article will discuss what Internet speed is, the importance of Internet speed, the range of Internet speed for an average home, and the factors that determine the ideal internet speed for an average home.
What is Internet speed?
Internet speed is how fast your Internet connection uploads and downloads information. It is measured in MBPS which is an acronym for MegaByte Per Seconds. In the past, when we were still majorly using Edge and 2G, it was mostly in KiloByte Per Second (KBPS). However, with faster Internet speed especially 4G and the expected 5G, it is not in MGPS. With any luck, it could become GBPS (GigaByte Per Seconds) in the next few years.
Importance of Internet Speed
The Internet speed is important because it determines how quickly your web page opens. Beyond that, it also determines how quickly whatever file you are trying to download be it a video, game, mail attachment, or any other type of file will download. Today, many reasons will have us downloading files that are several hundreds of MBs or even in Gigabytes.
Now, if you want to download a file and the size of the file is 10 GB. If you are using an internet speed of 100KB per second to download the file, it will take 100,000 seconds to download the file. This is approximately 28 hours of downloads. If you were to be using a connection with an Internet speed of 1 MB per second, you could download the same 10 GB file in less than 3 hours.
Now imagine today that Internet speeds are as high as over 10 MB per second. It means you could download a 10 GB file in less than 18 minutes. With 5G networks promising up to 50.9 MB per second, it means you could download a 10 GB file in less than 4 minutes.
Factors that determine the Internet speed for your home
Apart from the time it takes to download files, several activities require us to have very fast Internet in real-time. Example of such activities includes streaming of music or videos and playing of games. In some cases, you could need as much as 5 MB per second to have smooth streaming of the game playing experience. There might also be instances where at least 3 people in the house are carrying out such data-intensive activities, there will be the need for at least an Internet speed of 15 MB per second.
Hence, the major factors that determine the ideal Internet speed for your home are the number of people in your home, especially those that will be connected at the same time, and the data intensity of the activities they are interested in. Generally, the average house should be fine with an Internet speed of between 5 to 10 MB per second. However, it will still be better to have excess Internet speed than below what is needed in your home.