Tech Bytes
What To Consider Before Hiring Or Firing Your ISP
By Murithi Magiri
In the past few months Kenyans and the world in general have been bombarded with headlines in regards to market rivalry and stiff competition brought about by the new kid on the block - Starlink . The old boys have been forced to go back to their drawing boards to come up new strategies lest they are driven out of market and or their profitability shrinks . But how exactly can we get to choose the right provider among a litany of them , given that all we want is quality , speed , affordability and reliability ?
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is transforming the world . People and machines as well require connectivity . As we get more connected and more dependent on the internet for our daily lives ’, bandwidth is key in determining which provider to cast lot with . In networks , bandwidth is a measurement indicating the maximum capacity of a wired or wireless link to transmit data over a network connection in a given amount of time . Typically , bandwidth is represented in the number of bits , kilobits , megabits or gigabits that can be transmitted per second . Nowadays due to technological advances it is measured commercially
in Mbps and Gbps . Bandwidth is not a measure of network speed - a common misconception .
The more bandwidth a data connection has , the more data it can send and receive at one time . So , a low network bandwidth also impacts network speed . In concept , bandwidth can be compared to the volume of water that can flow through a pipe or say number of vehicles on a road . The wider the pipe ' s diameter , the more water can flow through it at one time . The more lanes the more vehicles can navigate through at a time , say a highway or a superhighway . Bandwidth works on the same principle . The higher the capacity of the communication link , the more data can flow through it per second .
The cost of a network connection goes up as bandwidth increases . Thus , a 1 Gbps dedicated link will be more expensive than one that can handle 100 Mbps of throughput and so forth .
The terms bandwidth and speed are often used interchangeably but not correctly . Essentially , speed refers to the rate at which data can be transmitted , while the definition of bandwidth is the capacity for that speed . To use the earlier water and road metaphors again , speed refers to how quickly water can be pushed through a pipe , how fast a vehicle can navigate the road ; bandwidth refers to the quantity of water that can be moved through the pipe over a set time frame and the number of vehicles that can move through the highway in a given time .
Bandwidth is not an unlimited resource just the way pipes and highways are not . So , ISPs package and market their plans accordingly ; Some dedicated , shared and others per quota or time-bound . Dedicated links are best suited for businesses , shared for home use and per quota or time-bound for mobile use .
To determine the bandwidth requirements , one should consider the applications to be used , the bandwidth requirements of each application and the number of simultaneous users . Applications such as online gaming and HD video streaming like Netflix and YouTube are bandwidth hogs , on the other end of the hand emailing and web browsing consume far less bandwidth .
Given the current rivalry it ’ s safe to conclude that fiber is almost always faster , more reliable , and more cost-effective than satellite internet where Starlink lies . Fiber has a much faster maximum and median speed and significantly less latency . With fiber , you can typically get speeds of up to 1 Gbps , which is ten times faster than Starlink ' s current maximum speed of 100 Mbps .
Latency is another major consideration when selecting a provider . Network latency is the time it takes for a data packet to travel from its source to its destination across a network . It ' s measured in milliseconds ( ms ). High latency can result in noticeable delays , affecting the performance of online applications and services . Latency is influenced by factors such as network congestion , distance between source and destination , and the quality of network connections .
The distance , quality of cables used and the speed of light in the fiber optics do cause propagation delay thus affecting latency . The type of medium used like fiber optics , copper cables , or wireless affects latency . For instance , fiber optic cables have
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