Your broadband questions answered
Terms and phrases
Kbps means Kilobits per second and Mbps means Megabits per second. Kbps and Mbps measure the speed of an internet connection - how quickly web pages, images, video clips, or music are downloaded from the web. One Kilobit is 1024 'bits' of information and one Megabit is 1048576 bits (a 1024 Kilobits). These speeds may also be represented as K or Kb, and M or Mb. These should not be confused with Bytes, Kilobytes and Megabytes.
Back to topA Gigabyte is a way of measuring how much you use the Internet. One Gigabyte (GB) is 1024 Megabytes (MB), and one Megabyte is 1024 Kilobytes (KB). Everything which goes across the Internet can be measured in this way, although some things use more than others. For example, just surfing the Internet you will use approximately 1.5KB per second. If you watch videos, you will use approximately 60KB per second. These should not be confused with Bits, Kilobits and Megabits.
This is a measure of the downstream data rate from your local exchange, which is the speed in which the information is transported to your modem. The Up to 8Mb range offers the highest available line rate that your line can reliably support.
This measure the speed of your end-to-end service, which is the speed information travels from the internet, over the network, to your local exchange and finally to your modem. This can be affected by many factors such as slow internet servers and congested networks due to high usage by other users. In less busy periods, the throughput rate will approach the line rate; you may perceive this as the service slowing down or accelerating but these are the normal features of a shared network.
The Up to 8Mb product is rate adaptive; this means that the equipment within your local exchange may automatically reduce your line rate to maintain reliable service. This will cause your modem to resynchronise to a new lower rate. Your modem will not automatically re-train when the line improves and can support a higher line rate. Therefore, before reporting a line rate related problem to Technical Support, it is strongly suggested that a manual re-synch of the modem is conducted to see if the line can now support a higher line rate, this can be performed by simply turning your modem off and back on again.