How Fast Is Cable Internet?
Cable internet is among the fastest residential services currently available in the marketplace today. The closest competitor with any market share is DSL, and for most users cable internet will offer much faster speeds. However, fiber optics have raised the bar for high speed Internet, and cable companies are racing to keep up with the maximum download speeds of 50 Mbps.
It is often advertised that cable Internet is 100 times faster than dial up, and while this is certainly possible it doesn't happen as often as users would like. Make no mistake that cable is far superior to dial up in every way, but 100 times faster would be 6 Mbps at all times. Cable will approach this, and even surpass it at times, but more often the speed will be between 3 and 4 Mbps with most services. This is still blazing fast.
With this kind of speed most web pages will load almost instantly, and files that would have taken hours on dial up can be accessed in moments. Uploading files becomes incredibly fast as well, although much less bandwidth is allocated for upstream traffic. Cable services generally offer upload speeds between 384 Kbps and 1.5 Mbps. The higher end upstream bandwidth is generally reserved for upgraded packages such as business class Cable Internet service. Even the general residential cable packages are faster than almost all the competition.