{"id":22832,"date":"2020-08-27T11:41:02","date_gmt":"2020-08-27T11:41:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.heartinternet.uk\/blog\/?p=22832"},"modified":"2020-08-27T11:41:02","modified_gmt":"2020-08-27T11:41:02","slug":"understanding-upload-and-download-speeds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.heartinternet.uk\/blog\/understanding-upload-and-download-speeds\/","title":{"rendered":"Understanding upload and download speeds"},"content":{"rendered":"

Broadband is an essential part of modern life, and upload and download speeds are central to any online experience.<\/p>\n

High speeds will ensure a smooth and seamless journey around the web, while slow speeds generally lead to frustration.<\/p>\n

Understanding how data is transmitted across the internet helps to explain why your current connection sometimes struggles to keep up, and whether an advertised line speed would deliver a better service.<\/p>\n

Getting the bit between your teeth<\/h3>\n

Any internet connection involves distributing the smallest piece of data a computer can understand \u2013 a bit.<\/p>\n

This is simply an instruction that something should be on or off \u2013 1 or 0 \u2013 and it\u2019s known as binary because there are only two options.<\/p>\n

This simple binary data fragment is repeated millions of times to enable electronic devices to function, and to generate content which is displayed and interacted with.<\/p>\n

Every webpage you visit or design, every online gaming experience, every Zoom chat with colleagues and relatives \u2013 they\u2019re all comprised of countless individual bits.<\/p>\n

Byte down<\/h3>\n

At this point, there\u2019s a key distinction to be made. Bits tend to be packaged together into bundles of eight, known as bytes.<\/p>\n

Bytes are the unit of measurement for data size \u2013 a JPG picture on your phone might be five megabytes, or roughly 5,000 bytes.<\/p>\n

Similarly, storage devices are measured in gigabytes or terabytes, abbreviated to capital letters depending on whether they\u2019re megabytes (MB), gigabytes (GB), and so forth.<\/p>\n

While bytes are the chosen unit of measurement for size, bits are the chosen unit for speed. Internet connections have always been measured in bits, which are written in lowercase and recorded per second.<\/p>\n

You might remember dial-up internet connections and the modems used to go online promising speeds of up to 56Kbps \u2013 that\u2019s 56 kilobits (thousand bits) per second.<\/p>\n

As broad\u2019 as it\u2019s long<\/h3>\n

Of course, nobody uses dial-up internet any longer. We\u2019ve all moved on to broadband, with speeds measured in megabits per second (Mbps). In other words, rather than thousands of bits being sent and received by our internet-enabled devices every second, there are millions of them.<\/p>\n

This has allowed the development of modern services such as streaming media platforms like Netflix, and software packages hosted remotely rather than being installed onto a computer.<\/p>\n

Now we know how internet traffic speeds are measured, it\u2019s important to consider the difference between uploads and downloads:<\/p>\n