Faster Internet Enables Better Performance
Think of Internet speed like water pressure in a tap. If you are only getting a trickle, you may be able to brush your teeth and fill the kettle, but it certainly wouldn’t be worth your while to try and water your garden. Or put the washing machine on.
Just as strong water pressure delivers a higher volume of water in a shorter period, a faster Internet connection will deliver more information in a shorter time.
So, while you actually could try and water your garden with trickle pressure, it would take all day. It’s the same with the Internet. You could try and stream your favourite Irokotv series one frame at a time, but the constant buffering would make the experience frustrating.
That is why understanding Internet speed is important. It is about ensuring that you subscribe to a service that has the speed that gives you the Internet experience you require.
Bandwidth
Bytes (and bits)
Ka-band technology
Latency
Upload speed & download speed
Bandwidth
Simply put, bandwidth is the term that describes the highest speed an Internet connection is capable of transmitting. Just as the size of the tap you have is a determining factor in your water pressure capacity, so bandwidth determines your Internet speed capacity.
Bytes (and bits)
Internet speed is measured by identifying how many bits or bytes (the term for units of information) are transferred in one second.
Because these units are so small, metric-based prefixes are used to describe them as follows:
- Kilo for 1,000 kilobits or kilobytes per second (KBps or Kbps)
- Mega for 1 million megabits or megabytes per second (MBps or Mbps)
- Giga for 1 billion gigabits or gigabytes per second (Gbps or GBps)
Most Internet upload speeds are expressed in Mbps, while the slower uploads are measured in Kbps.
Ka-band technology
Your satellite connection is affected by the frequency you receive it on. The Ka-band is the very latest in satellite technology. The reason for this lies in its frequency. Older technologies had frequencies in the 12 to 18 GHz range, while Ka-band uses frequencies in the 26.5 to 40 GHz range.
This higher frequency means that it is possible to get more bandwidth, which means a higher data transfer rate and, therefore, higher performance and speed.
Think of it like a radio frequency. An older AM radio typically has a low frequency of around 1MHz, whereas a more modern FM radio has a frequency of approximately 1GHz. The FM radio would transmit a crisper sound because of its higher frequency.
That is why we use it to deliver affordable, dependable, high-performance satellite solutions to our customers!You
Latency
Latency is the time it takes for a signal to make a round-trip journey from your smart device and back. There is a half-second delay with satellite Internet service caused by the distance that data needs to travel up to the satellite and back again. Therefore, time-sensitive applications that require fractions-of-a-second user inputs (such as online gaming or real-time equities trading) are not supported by Phase3.
A ping is not a reliable latency measurement. The reason for this is that a Satellite is based in a geostationary orbit approximately 36,000 km above the equator. Due to the distance it has to cover, it will normally take approximately 600ms.
Added to this, a ping is classified as a low priority command by networks. This means that all other applications will be processed before the ping command.
As there is no acceleration applied to the ping command, this can sometimes cause increased ping times or even a ‘time out’ – making it an undependable speed test.
Upload speed & download speed
Two numbers that you will always encounter when subscribing to an Internet solution are the upload speed and download speed of the service:
Download speed is the speed at which your computer or smart device ‘gets’ information from the Internet. In other words, when you try and open your email, your download speed would determine how long it takes to load your emails and applications.
Upload speed is the speed at which information travels from your internet-connected device to the Internet. So if you send an email, your upload speed would determine how long it takes for your email to arrive in the mailbox of the intended recipient.
You will notice that download speeds are much higher than upload speeds.
The reason for this is that Internet users download much more information than what they upload.
So watching movies, getting the latest best-seller from Amazon for your Kindle or scrolling though Facebook doesn’t require much upload speed.
Upload speed counts when you rely heavily on the Internet to do interactive activities like video chatting on Skype or sending large files through applications like Wetransfer.
How much Internet speed do you need?
Different homes and businesses can have very different Internet needs. A single person who uses the internet only for social media and the occasional email won’t need as much internet speed as a business of five people who video conference, for example.
Let’s take a look at some internet speeds and what you can do with them:
Netflix streaming requires a download speed of 1.5 Mbps for low quality, 3 Mbps for SQ quality, and 5 Mbps for HD quality, so any of Phase3’s satellite solutions can comfortably handle any entertainment binge-watching needs!
Streaming music via applications like Spotify and Napster is also ideal on our packages. Music giant Spotify for example only requires .096 Mbps of speed for streaming on your mobile and .1670 Mbps to listen on your computer or tablet. Spotify also has recommendations on how you can minimize data usage when using its services.
Phase3 P3Tech solutions also deliver good video chat capability. Video chat users, according to Skype, need 1.5 Mbps download and 1.5 Mbps upload, while video calls with multiple people need 8 Mbps to download.
Phase3 P3Tech satellite broadband solutions are able to deliver fast internet services in remote locations.