Computer newbies forum: Real Impact of Differences in Internet Connection Speeds

Considering that you'll never actually see rated speeds, it's a moot point. The sad fact is, due to variables such as distance to the servers, time of day, and the number of people in your neighborhood online at any given time, you'll be lucky to get 25% of any rated speed from your internet provider. Maybe some day we as consumers will force the telecom/cable providers to tell us the actual typical bandwidth for our areas instead of pie-in-the-sky "up to" speeds.

Actually, I suspect you will see a marked difference even for just plain old web browsing. I used to get around 12Mb speeds from my cable company. I switched to FIOS and get a solid, consistent 20Mb (at least according to various speed tests). I definitely noticed an improvement in browsing speeds. Of course, it depends on the page. A simple page with only a paragraph of text will download in an instant regardless of connection speed. But, a lot more pages today have a lot of content that takes a while to load. A bunch of pictures, flash animations (ads are a big resource hog), java apps, etc. can really slow things down. Consider this. Any web page that takes longer than, say, one tenth of a second to download (which I suspect is most of them) will benefit greatly from a faster connection speed.

Also, depending on what you're doing, you should also look at the upload speed provided. It will likely be much slower than the download speed, so if you transfer large files or do videoconferencing, etc., you should compare this as well.

Of course, there are other issues. You have to consider the source. If the website's host is only providing, say, 5Mb of bandwidth, then anything above 5 at your end really won't help. Any bottleneck along the way will limit your bandwidth. It's the weakest link that determines the strength of the chain. Also, there are network settings that can improve your browsing speeds.

It's sad really, but when internet connection speeds were a thousand times slower, the perception of speed (specifically while browsing)wasn't that much different. Web pages were simpler and loaded quick enough. Yes, we have fancier content now, but most popular sites still take 5 seconds to load today, mostly so they can show you more ads. I was expecting the internet to work like turning the pages of a book. I'm still waiting.