High Speed Internet access has become a popular drawing card for patrons of hotels and restaurants across the United States. Every major hotel chain, as well as many of the smaller hotel and motel chains in the country offer the service as part of the accommodation package for leisure travelers and business travelers. It adds another amenity to the offerings when booking a hotel for business meetings or conventions. Laptop owners with wireless cards can now log onto the internet from the comfort of their rooms or from the convenience of the hotel lobby. Some hotels permit internet access on with the use of a password protected wireless service, and some require the user to connect to the system with an Ethernet cable.

Restaurant chains are following suit due to necessity. More than ever, their patrons are using their facilities to hold business luncheon meetings or to simply catch up on emails while taking a coffee break. Panera Bread Company has been a leader since its inception. This is the company that led the nationwide trends of artisan bread and quick casual/specialty foods. It became the trend setter once again when it equipped its bakery-cafes from coast to coast with free public broadband internet, called Wi-Fi (wireless fidelity) access. This was a long term commitment made by a company that understood the growing consumer demand for Internet access in a relaxed, comfortable environment without charging for the service.

And not to be left in the high speed connectivity dust is the fast food chain, McDonald's. Beginning with the San Francisco Bay area, this quick service mogul gave their clientèle another reason to frequent their establishments - by providing Wi-Fi for wireless-enabled notebook computers and hand held devices. This is all part of its marketing strategy to entice the thousands of mobile professionals, business travelers, and students between home and school who more than ever have a need to connect to work, family and friends while on the move. High Speed ISP access has become part of the culture of convenience across North America.

A common question for network connectivity is "how much bandwidth is enough?" While bandwidth can boil down to upload and download limits from an ISP, the overall question is really one of network speed - how fast is the network connection to the Internet? Network speed is greatly influenced by the routing methods used to direct network traffic; the better the traffic routing, the better the network connection's speed and reliability.

Routing Traffic: BGP

The Internet is made up of millions of individual servers, which are all interconnected, like houses on main streets and bystreets. Some central networks, called backbones, have connections to millions of servers, which makes it easier to send traffic along those routes.

If an ISP is connected to a single Internet backbone, then they only have one route to use to send traffic. However, this means if that backbone goes down, the network connection goes down. For redundancy, most ISPs have connections to at least two backbones, and traffic is routed between those backbones.

When there are multiple backbones to choose from, there has to be some way to identify the most efficient route. The most common routing logic is border gateway protocol (BGP) which counts the number of networks (autonomous system, or AS, hops) that each route has between the starting server and the destination server.

For example, one person wants to send an email from their home account with SBC Global to their friend at MSN. SBC is on one network, and MSN is on another. Route A reports six AS hops between SBC and MSN, and Route B has three AS hops between them. With BGP routing, the traffic is sent on Route B.

Performance-Based Routing

The big limitation of BGP is that it only gauges AS hops rather than other more important factors, like latency. Route B from the last example has only three AS hops, meaning traffic only has to cross three networks to reach its destination. However, BGP routing only counts AS hops - it cannot account for the number of individual routers in an autonomous system. Route B may only cross three networks, but if Network 1 has five routers, Network 2 has four routers, and Network 3 has eight routers, the traffic has to go through 17 routers before it can reach its destination. If Route A crosses six networks but each network only has a single router, the traffic only has to pass through six routers. That means that Route A may be significantly faster than Route B, but BGP routing has no way to recognize that, so it sends traffic down the slower route.

Performance-based routing offsets the limits of BGP, and takes a more intelligent approach to traffic routing, by looking at other factors than AS hops:

• Performance metrics like latency, jitter, and packet loss
• Current network load
• Connection type, such as T1 or OC3

Latency can be either the time to send a packet one-way or the round-trip time, like the time to send ICMP packets (ping) to one server and receive the response. Jitter is the fluctuation in latency times. For example, if the first trip time is 3ms and the next is 105ms and the next is 20ms, there is a large swing between trip times, and, therefore, there is high jitter on the connection. Packet loss is the number of packets (information) which never reach their destination. The current load is how much traffic is currently on that connection, and the connection type indicates how much traffic the network can handle effectively.

By looking at the actual quality of the network connection, performance-based routing can select much faster, more reliable routes.

What Better Routing Really Means

Poor routing can corrupt or interrupt packets, requiring information to be resent and increasing the overall time it takes to do anything on the network. While simple tasks like web browsing may not be affected by poor network performance, a number of vital applications can be impaired by poor routing protocols in ways that may not be apparent in a simple upload/download size summary:

• Any kind of media application, such as streaming video or audio
• Potentially business-critical applications like voice over IP (VoIP) or video conferencing
• Upload and download times
• Email delivery
• Remote network applications like VPNs

If you are one of the many people who have friends or family in other countries, then you know how expensive it still can be to make international phone calls. There is nothing like hearing a loved ones voice to brighten your day, but that brightness can quickly fade to black when you get your phone bill.

The best way of all to converse with friends and family in other countries is by instant messaging or email. If you have internet service purchased through your satellite, phone, or cable company and if you can type adequately, then you can email and send instant messages. Either one is a great way to talk your head off for free, or type your fingers off, whichever comes off first.

It can be frustrating for many people who might be older or if you are someone younger just learning your way around a computer. It is really easy to instant message and email once you get the hang of it. After a little practice, it becomes easier than dialing a telephone and so much cheaper, well, free actually.

Setting up your email and instant messaging is not very complicated at all. Conquering your fear of using the computer is over half the battle.

When you choose a site that you want to use for your email, just follow the step by step directions that the site will provide you with. If you can follow simple directions and learn what all the little icons, or symbols mean, you will be all set.

Emailing is when you type a message and or send an attachment like photos or documents, to someone else's email address. These messages and items are sent almost instantly, but you do have to wait for the other party to email you back.

It is a great way to communicate with someone if the message or items do not require an immediate response, unless the party is expecting your email and gets right back to you.

Instant messaging is what is known as real time communication. This is where you use your instant messaging service to type back and forth with someone else who is also on line.

You can chat back and forth just like you would over the phone only you use your keyboard. You can also send pictures using instant messaging too.

If you love to chat, you will love instant messaging. If you do not like chatting, try email and you only have to respond when you feel like it.

Broadband Internet access, which most often shortened to just "broadband", is high-speed Internet access contrasted with dial-up access over a modem. Dial-up modems are usually capable of only a maximum bitrate of 56 kbit/s and require the full use of a telephone line; while at the same time broadband technologies supply at least twice this speed without disrupting telephone usage.

Even though various minimum speeds have been used in definitions of broadband, ranging up from 64 kbit/s up to 1.0 Mbit/s, the OCED report is typical in counting only download speeds equal to or faster than 256 kbit/s as broadband. Speeds are defined in terms of maximum download as several common consumers broadband technologies such as ADSL are "asymmetric", supporting much slower maximum upload speeds than download.

Broadband internet is sometimes called high-speed Internet, as it usually has a high rate of data transmission. Generally, any connection to the customer of 256 kbit/s (0.256 Mbit/s) or more is considered as broadband Internet. As per the International Telecommunication Union Standardisation Sector recommendation I.113, broadband is defined as a transmission capacity which is faster than primary rate ISDN, at 1.5 to 2 Mbit/s.

Practically, the advertised bandwidth is not always readily available to the customer; ISPs generally allow a greater number of subscribers than the backbone connection can handle, under the assumption that most users will not be using their full connection capacity very frequently.

This aggregation strategy works in a way making the users typically burst to the full bandwidth most of the time. As there is an increase in the bandwidth delivered to end users, the market expects that the video on demand services streamed over the Internet will become more popular, though at the present time such services generally require specialized networks.

The Internet provides a great number of opportunities for entertainment, connecting with friends and business associates, getting an education, tracking investments, and finding great deals while shopping. With all of these advantages, you probably want to have a high speed Internet connection in your home if you don't have one there already. While upgrading from dial up is a good thing to do, you're probably kind of confused by the options that you have available to you. This is understandable with all of the different technologies and the companies that are offering them that you have to choose from.

If you're fortunate enough to have access to cable TV, then you're also probably fortunate enough to be able to get an Internet connection that's delivered over that same broad band digital cable technology. Granted that if you have access to cable Internet, then you also probably have access to DSL, satellite, and possibly some kind of municipal WiFi Internet as well, but there are still a lot of reasons to consider broad band cable.

The first advantage that broad band cable has over other forms of broad band Internet technology is speed. With the possible exception of muni WiFi, broad band cable high speed Internet has the largest bandwidths with download speeds that vary from six to twelve megabytes per second, depending on the level of service that's been subscribed to and whether or not the special Power Boost feature (which increases the baseline download speed by fifty percent for larger downloads) has kicked in. Both satellite Internet and DSL have bandwidths that are stuck around three megabytes per second and often quite lower, depending on where you live and how much you're willing to pay.

Getting your Internet connection over a cable also provides a greater level of security than any kind of WiFi. In fact, there are even people who look for WiFi connections so that they can see what's being transmitted- in effect spying on what WiFi users are looking at. Since there isn't a good way to make muni WiFi service secure, this is a very real danger. It's also theoretically possible to spy on satellite Internet signals as well.

Naturally, since DSL is transmitted over phone lines, it has a similar level of security to broad band digital cable Internet connection, but there are many other ways in which an Internet connection based on digital cable technology is superior. The fact that cables are a lot beefier than phone lines means that the signal that can be sent over them is a lot faster and more reliable. After all, skinny phone lines are subject to a lot more interference than coaxial cables and that interference can really slow things down.

All of the extra speed and reliability and security that you can get from a broad band cable Internet connection such as Comcast's translates into a level of Internet performance that you've probably only experienced in libraries, coffee shops, or at work up to this point.

Dial up is a very slow way of getting online, but many people are still using it because it is simple and cheap. DSL has been around for many years, but it has traditionally been expensive and the extra speed that it gives is not always enough to make up for the effort of getting a new service. Considering the importance of Internet to daily life these days, having only these two options of getting online seems fairly bleak. However, over the last couple years, a different service emerged, known as broadband cable Internet. This service has proven to be a very popular service because it has been able to eliminate many of the problems that plague both dial up and DSL.

Comcast's broadband cable Internet arose out of the knowledge that the infrastructure that delivers cable television also had the capacity to deliver Internet services. Once Comcast decided to go digital with its television services, the company updated all of its underground cables to accommodate more bandwidth transmission and to make it easier to transport data. This upgrade make it possible for the company to add on new broadband cable Internet services without compromising its cable television services. Internet, as a digital medium, is fully compatible with the transmission of digital television, and sharing the same infrastructure for the two services made it possible for Comcast Cable to start offering an Internet service without extreme expense (and thus keeping prices competitive).

What broadband cable Internet excels most at is speed. For instance, when other types of services offer a couple of Mbps as their top speed, Comcast offers up to 8 Mbps. This difference in speed is due to the different technologies that carry services such as DSL and those that carry broadband cable Internet. As would be expected, as technology becomes even more advanced, cable will still be able to maintain a higher connection speed than other types of services.

Even at this time, it is possible to see that high speed Internet technology is moving forward to the time when even higher speeds are needed. Though PowerBoost speeds - a way of giving bursts of speed at certain times- (which reach 12 Mbps) are not maintained at all times, they come into play when extra speed is necessary. PowerBoost is an innovative way of allocating limited bandwidth to the customers who are in need of more of it at any given time, and the technology will likely become more widespread in the future.

For the basic Internet user, cable's high speed Internet services offer more than enough speed to do even extremely bandwidth-intensive applications, also enough speed to provide each member of a household with enough bandwidth to simultaneously get online. Some of the most common uses of the Internet are to check email, share info and photos with friends and family, and to take advantage of online entertainment. Though some of the online entertainment sites require very fast connections, the higher speed cable connections provide plenty of speed.

As the popularity of broadband cable Internet keeps on increasing, we will probably soon see the day when other forms of Internet become obsolete. Broadband cable Internet provides a much higher quality service but, thanks to its reliance on existing infrastructure, is cost-effective for all users.