The internet is constantly speeding up. Once upon a time, the best you could expect was a few kilobits per second over a phone line, and that was enough to load web pages with ASCII images and a few text-only posts. But as time went on and connections became faster, you could start to expect images to load after a few seconds and listen to some extremely compressed music that took a couple minutes to completely download.
These days, many online users expect and get speeds of 10 megabits per second, and at that speed, you can get high-definition videos to stream, listen to as much high-quality music as you want, and watch as the text and images on websites load up instantly. But now there’s a new speed in San Antonio, and depending on where you live you can get speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second, which is over 100 times faster than 10 Mbps. And while that sounds good and is certainly useful for businesses, many home internet users are wondering what makes the extra speed worth the trouble and the expense.
1. High Definition Is Getting Higher
720p is where high definition began, but on a modern screen that’s hardly more than 7 and a half inches high. Modern TV screens and a growing number of computer monitors are much bigger than that, which is why 1080p is steadily replacing 720p as the new standard for high definition. Except there’s a new standard that’s starting to appear: 4K, also known as 2160p, which can display perfect detail on a modern large TV screen. And to get a 4K video on today’s home internet speeds, you need to wait for a long download or a lot of buffering.
2. More People Work From Home
Not every remote job needs employees who can quickly download large files, but those that do will often need to work with a lot of large files like software programs and videos. These files take their time rendering and compiling, and a slow home internet speed makes it take even longer to show your employer your work.
3. Everyone Shares A Connection
If you live in a house with a big family, you’ve probably noticed that when someone else is downloading a big file, your connection slows down. That’s because your connection has only so much bandwidth available. A faster home internet connection gives you a lot more bandwidth to spare, improving everyone’s connection speed and letting bandwidth-hogging downloads end faster.
Online speeds keep going up because home and business users keep demanding more speed. So if a gigabit fiber connection comes to your San Antonio neighborhood, you should seriously consider how it could help you.