|
FIOS will sometimes advertise speed as "75 up 75 down" or "50/50" or something similar, Comcast will generally advertise their down speed and they may say something like 100 Mbps. That's Mega bits per second.
So in the case of 75/75, they will transmit up to 75,000,000 bits of data per second, and receive 75,000,000 bits of data from you per second. Very roughly speaking, you can translate that to 7,500,000 characters per second.
I abbreviate that as "75 MB" but, believe it or not, the capitalization of "B" is fiercely argued over in tech weenie sectors, so even that is probably wrong. 75 Mbps is probably right.
Anyway, roughly speaking, a modern HD movie takes up about 5 Megabits of a connection, so if you have a 20 Mbps connection, you can stream four movies at a time. With my 75 Mbps FIOS I can stream 15 of them.
Or you can retrieve the entire cellar.org... 17 years of images, text and data... in about a half hour. On my 75 Mbps connection it takes 8 minutes.
If that's too slow, they are now advertising 1Gbps connections. That's 1000Mbps. At that speed, your hard drives can be replaced with online cloud and you might not even notice.
|