Many of us use our PCs, Macs or even cell phones to access the internet every single day. But have you ever thought to ask yourself how it all works? The Internet started as a small internetwork of military computers. The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a division of the U.S. Department of Defense, laid the foundations for the modern Internet we know today.
By 1992, the network bandwidth of the Internet had increased 20 million times the bandwidth seen in 1964. In November of 1992 Delphi was the first commercial online service offering Internet access, and by May 1995 AOL, Prodigy and CompuServce came online.
Dial up Internet access started the modern Internet speed revolution. It was the only method of Internet access in 1994. Dial up allows a user to access the Internet through an analog modem and traditional telephone system. Dial up speeds began at 0.1 kbits per second. One kbits is equal to 1000 bytes of information per second.
Over the next few years Dial up slowly increased speeds up to 56 kbps. Did you know, in the 1990’s U. S. Federal Law limited Dial up Internet speeds to 53 kbits per second? The U. S. Government feared Hackers could breach U.S. Government networks and disappear before they could be traced by the proper authorities.
Dial up still depends on phone lines for the transporting data, and is used often in rural areas today. Soon dial up may become obsolete and will be replaced by Broadband Internet Access. A broadband connection allows for the transfer of data at a much higher rate than through analog.
Broadband is generally defined as data transfer rates greater than 256 kbit per second. There is not an official minimum bandwidth for broadband. Broadband internet access can range from 64 kbits per second up to 4.0 Megabytes of data per second.
Internet speeds continue to increase to meet customer demands. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are building faster networks with the development of new technologies. By 1996 the first mobile phone had Internet connectivity, and not long after in 2008 studies showed that more people accessed the Internet via mobile phones than PCs. The development of 4G networks, which set peak speed requirements at 100 Mbit/s, help users connect to the Internet at speeds never before seen with a mobile device.
Looking back at the history of internet speeds we can see just how far we’ve come since the 1960’s. Where do you think data speed transfer rates will be in 5-10 years?
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