Upload duration

Broadband speed is measured in megabits per second, commonly written as Mb or Mbps (as in 24Mb, or 24Mbps). Ensure that you don't get confused between megabits and megabytes (which tends to be written as MB, or GB when referring to gigabytes) - In summary, there are eight bits in a byte, so, if your download speed is 8 megabits per second (8Mb), then that's actually shifting 1 megabyte per second (1MB). It's an important distinction, because file sizes (such as songs, images and movie clips) are described in megabytes, as are download allowances. So to recap, its megabits per second (Mb) when talking about broadband speed, and megabytes (MB) - or gigabytes (GB) for large files - when talking about file sizes and download caps.

You may also come across Kb and KB - kilobits and kilobytes - there are 1,024KB in a MB, and 1,024MB in a GB - the same goes for Kb/Mb/Gb.

When you connect to the internet, the download speed is the pace at which data (websites, programmes, music etc) is transferred from another computer to yours. Currently, when it comes to home broadband, advertised download speeds range from 8Mb to 50Mb, but this is rising at a pretty quick rate - you can expect a broadband download speed of between 100Mb and 200Mb to become commonplace over the next few years. Pretty impressive, as a 2Mb download speed was the common standard just a few years ago.

It's the speed at which data is uploaded through the internet. Broadband upload speeds are generally much slower than download speeds. The reason for this is that people generally do far more downloading than uploading, so downloading is given priority by the ISPs (who regulate how their networks deal with the various traffic that is vying to be sent across the ether). Upload speeds become more important to someone who is going to be doing large amounts of uploading, such as someone who works from home.

If upload broadband speeds are important to you, be sure to choose an ISP that takes its upload speed seriously, e.g. an upload broadband speed of 'up to' 2.5Mb. The distance from your telephone exchange, as well as other considerations such as old household wiring, can also be factors in slowing down your upload speed.

It's important to note that you won't always get the broadband speed you might expect - in fact it is likely that you will never actually get a speed of 8Mb on an 8Mb line. While advertised broadband download speeds now tend to start at 'up to 8Mb', the 'up to' can cover a pretty big range - one man's 8Mb connection can be another's 2Mb connection.

Your broadband speed can vary wildly at different times of the day depending on external factors, such as the number of users online in your building, your street, and even your country. Also, as more people are online, some ISPs deliberately slow down lines in busy periods of the day - this is called 'traffic shaping'. For these reasons, ensure that you do a number of broadband speed tests at different times of the day - and on different days (weekdays, weekends etc) - to get a better image of the kind of broadband speeds you are receiving.