Shifting Through Networking Technology Thrash

While the home PC has become a staple appliance at home to get things done from printing you kid's greeting cards to working on an office report while at home, getting an internet connection has become increasingly necessary not to get the data for your kid's homework, but also to access the email and social networking sites the modern homeowner can no longer live without.

The typical homebound housewife needs to be abreast with technology terms associated with the computer, like hard drives, RAM, CD-ROMS, USB and all those 3-4 letter words that come with any PC. And that goes to networking. You need some basic networking familiarity in this internet world.

But not to worry, for most consumers with the least patience with technology jargon and techno bubble, there are only a couple of terms worth remembering when dealing with the internet connection that they are most likely to get into.  

What is important to the consumer is the speed of internet connection. Reliability as well, but that should be something you can safely take for granted as your typical ISP have the network set up to deliver reliable internet connections that is usually 99% reliable all the time. Unless there's a hurricane that knocks down data connectivity aerials or an earthquake destroying land cables, internet connection reliability can be safely dispensed with for the consumer.  

Bandwidth

So what are the terms the consumer needs to remember?  One is Bandwidth. This is the equivalent to the super highway in communications. Only this time, it's data that is going through. The wider the highway the more data can get through and the faster they get to their destination. The more bandwidth you have, the faster you can get to sites, surf and download information.  Bear in the mind that the larger the data file, the longer it takes to get to your computer, so you need larger bandwidths.

In the early days on internet, the technology that allowed households to connect were just ordinary telephone lines connected to a modem that gets hooked to the PC. It was slow, you'd be lucky to get anywhere near its maximum data carrying capacity often touted at 33 kbps. These days, you rarely can get by without a broadband connection. The term simply takes off from getting a broader network highway, usually starting at 64kbps and averaging 1 Mbps.

Now that we've mentioned them, Mbps stands for Megabit per second and Kbps stands for kilobit per second. They measure the number of data bits that travel along your connection per second. A Kilo stands for 1000 while mega stands for a million.

Network Latency

Another term you just need to have in the back of your head is latency. A large bandwidth will not always guarantee fast speeds if there's high latency in the network. The term stands for the delay in responding the request coming from you PC every time you click on an icon on the display.

You either have a low latency or high latency network. The delay happens most of the time in the latter. Satellite connection is one with the highest latency. That's because it takes time for your requests and the responding data to travel form earth stations to the satellite and then back to earth.  Other latency factors include the speed of the servers behind the sites you are clicking on to get the data you need or the many internet nodes that your request will have to go through. There could be many so called 'hop' or jump point between you ISP and the website site you are on which determines latency. GP

About the Author:

ITC Sales are a leading supplier of Dell and HP Laptops such as the Dell Precision and the Dell Vostro.