What are the benefits of using a broadband Internet connection?

T
he old technology only provided copper wires. This plain old telephone service became known by its acronym... POTS service. With advances of technology and the use of fiber optical cables for transmission of data, we now have moved forward into the broadband era.

The following sections are short discussions for the general layman to give an idea of what broadband is. I am not going to go into involved technological details. If this is what you are looking for, it can be found with a Google search specifying the proper keywords on which you want more detail.

VoIP

Broadband is necessary for Voice over Internet (VoIP) due to the large data packets of digitized voice information. VoIP actually sends the voice in a digitized data stream and converts back to analog on the other end.

The process is much more complicated that this. The data is split into packets of data. Each packet is encoded with its source and its destination as well as where it fits in the order with the other packets. When things work out right, all the packets arrive at the destination on time and can be put back in the right order before being converted back to an analog audio signal.

VoIP has come a long way in the past 10 years. When voice was first transmitted via Internet, it failed miserably. The speed of the Internet was not fast enough. Packets would get lost or arrive out of order too slow for the pieces to be put back in order in time to be converted back to analog without loss of data.

Because of the advances with broadband speed and data compression, VoIP communication is just as good or even better than prior voice over copper POTS lines.

Video

With the perfection of data compression along with broadband speeds, steaming video has also become very reliable. The transmission of data works the same as with VoIP, where the video is converted into digital data and sent in coded packets over the broadband network.

There are many services and web sites that provide streaming video now and this is still growing.

YouTube, which was purchased by Google, is one of the biggest video data providers. And they allow anyone to create an account and upload their own videos to share or place on other sites with widgets that make it easy for a webmaster to embed video into their web pages.

Hulu.com is another. They provide video streaming of movies and archived television programs.

Clicker.com is a new site that has a variety of movies, TV programs, and music videos.

Broadband Video Equipment for the Home

Apple makes the Apple TV and Google has come out with Google TV. Apple has not had much success yet but I think that will change soon. They just came out with it too early and the market wasn't ready for it yet.

Google has partnered with Sony to include Google TV in new Sony HDTV's. But Google also sells an add-on device to get Google TV on any older TV, as long as it isn't too old. It needs to be an HDTV with a HDMI interface to connect the unit to the TV. Isn't it strange to hear me refer to an HDTV as old? Things are moving fast.

Gigabit Ethernet

Gigabit Ethernet is an IEEE 802.3 protocol that is becoming available in major cities. Local phone companies will be able to tell you if they have this available in your building. It is the method of choice for large data centers due to its high-speed Internet capacity. It also provides the means for large-scale phone communications systems.