If you've paid any attention at all to the emergence of all the new opportunities that are presented by the expansion of the Internet in general and the World Wide Web specifically, you probably don't want to be left out of any of it. However, in order to fully take advantage of all the opportunities and riches of the Internet, you need a high speed Internet connection. That said, the prospect of figuring out what kind of Internet connection to get and which company to get it from can be problematic to say the least. This is even more true if you aren't gifted with an aptitude to understand technology. Fortunately, there are only a few types of high speed Internet that you need to sort through and which company you get your Internet access from is largely dependent on which type of Internet access you get.



For instance, broadband cable high speed Internet technology is a good choice in many ways and it's available through digital cable TV companies like Comcast. Broadband cable high speed Internet has numerous advantages. For example, with download speeds of up to eight megabytes per second, it's the fastest type of Internet access that you can get in your own home. (T1 lines are faster, but they're reserved for big businesses, academic institutions, and governments.) Broadband cable is also extremely stable and reliable, and since it doesn't rely on phone lines to transmit information it presents the unique option of allowing you to divorce the phone company entirely and using a VoIP service for your telephone needs instead.

DSL is probably the most widely used technology for accessing the Internet. It uses conventional phone lines to transmit data, and for that reason DSL is most often provided through traditional phone companies. The speed of a DSL connection depends on the quality of the phone line and the distance of the user from a central node. Even at its best, DSL can only attain download speeds that are about a sixth of what broadband cable connection can attain. Because of the need for a working phone line, DSL obviously won't allow you to sever your connection with the phone company entirely.

Satellite Internet technology is another form of high speed Internet technology and perhaps the most widely available one in the geographical sense, but it's plagued with a variety of drawbacks that make it extremely unattractive for most people. The first drawback is that it's extremely expensive, despite the fact that it's only a little bit faster than DSL. The fact that with a satellite Internet connection all of the data has to travel to and from high orbiting satellites produces a lag in response time that makes it completely unsuitable for both VoIP applications and video gaming.

After examining all of these options, it becomes clear that broadband cable high speed Internet technology is the ideal choice for accessing the Internet.

Hopefully this article has given you a good idea of the relative merits of different types of Internet connection technology and help you find the best provider of that technology for your specific needs.