Hi, I’m John Ogren, and this is a podcast from SpeedConnect high speed broadband. What can your ISP do for you, or more importantly, what should you be looking for when choosing an ISP? Very often it starts with price, right? What seems to be the cheapest? Who has the best deal? Very often from there it goes to Internet speed. That though, is usually bursts of speed; most will advertise how fast we can splash up a web page: 5mpbs, 10mpbs, maybe some will say 16mpbs, but of course, that’s just the bursts of speed. As we know, often what is more important is the speed that can be sustained. It’s sustained speed that lets you watch movies – or for that matter, over the long term – download large files, multimedia files or updates for your computer. Then after that, we look to latency, because it’s very important that your Internet Service Provider has good, solid, fast connections with the other servers that make up the World Wide Web. So, the longer it takes for one server to talk to another is measured as latency. And the longer the latency, not only the slower the connection, but the more mistakes that can be made in the transmission, which then requires that the packets – the bits and bytes of data – be retransmitted. But then in a way, that all comes down to reliability. That’s the thing that is most important. You get what you pay for and it isn’t much good if you get a very low price but the service that you get is inconsistent. Maybe it works great and fast one day, that seems fine but then the day you really need it, it doesn’t work: the movie you’re trying to watch buffers, or the connection is lost entirely, or that day you decided to work at home, it’s not there and you can’t get email or the report off to your boss. And so, in many ways, the most important thing your ISP should provide is consistency. The service provider you’ve chosen gives you the same speed, day in and day out, the same latency, day in and day out, and provides the same, consistent through-put, day in and day out. That means the provider has to have built a very robust network behind your connection. In many ways, it is equally important that that service provider has the team of people standing behind it, all the time, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week so that if something isn’t right, they’re right there quickly to fix it – hopefully before you, as the customer, really knows there’s a problem. |
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