There are lots of great things that you can get out of having a high speed Internet connection in your own home, but first you have to figure out what constitutes a high speed connection and then figure out how to get the fastest connection that you possibly can. That's because not all Internet connections that claim to be "broad band" or "high speed" are equal in their abilities to deliver Internet information to your computer's hard drive. There's actually a lot more to high speed Internet than just getting a so called high speed connection!

Comcast provides a great illustration of this. It claims to have a broad band high speed connection and actually backs it up with download speeds that are as high as 12 mbps for short periods of time (to help out with the really big downloads) and 8 mbps the rest of the time. That's plenty of speed to allow you to take advantage of the resources that the Internet has to offer. For example, it's a lot easier to start your own online business when you have a faster Internet connection. You can upload pictures of your products more quickly, download the software that you need to run your business more quickly, and even correspond with clients more quickly.

A high speed Internet connection that's based on cable technology is also a good move for entertainment and recreation as well. That's because high speed Internet is a good way to enjoy amateur videos from YouTube, play online multiplayer computer games, and correspond with people from all over the world. Virtual reality is something that combines those last two. Specifically virtual worlds like Second Life and World of WarCraft will provide this experience for you. World of WarCraft has a kind of fantasy theme, while Second Life is more like an idealized version of the real world. Movies and music are also easy to download when you have a fast Internet connection.

Unfortunately other companies that provide their high speed Internet services using technologies other than cable just don't deliver the same kind of speed. DSL for example, which is one of the more popular Internet access technologies, just doesn't deliver very fast download speeds. It only delivers about 2 mbps at the most for private homes. More often DSL download speeds are more in the realm of well under 1 mbps! That's a really slow download speed. This results from the fact that DSL service is delivered over phone lines instead of high quality coaxial cables. Satellite Internet has similar shortcomings only they're more pronounced, or more annoying, because of the fact that satellite Internet costs so much more than anything else. It's about twice as expensive as cable or the typical DSL service! Satellite Internet also has a time lag built into it that makes enjoying things like virtual reality even tougher.