On Dec 16, 3:18*pm, personaobscura
wrote:
On Thu, 16 Dec 2010 14:45:10 -0800 (PST), Larry L
wrote:



My kid is moving back home while he waits to head off to grad
school. * In the mean time he has three jobs, two of which are as
research assistants for professors and apparently require lots of time
on the Internet.

So, I guess we're in the market for a fast connection. * *Nothing
"wired" is available out here and I'm trying to figure out the
differences between "radio" and satellite wireless providers.

Currently my little tray icon says 26.4 kbps and I'm also trying to
get a feel for how much faster 1.5 megabyte/sec is and how that should
be abbreviated ... MB/sec *MBps *mbps mb/sec etc etc. * *I thought I
knew some of this stuff but it's many many years since I had any real
interest in puters and my "knowledge: has evaporated. *After thumbing
through 3 wireless ISP companies brochures I'm even more confused than
my norm.

TIA

Well, the math is simple enough: if you really can achieve 1.5 Megabytes per
second on a wireless WAN connection available in your location, that's nearly
500 times higher throughput than your 26.4 Kilobit dial-up connection
provides.

From a utility viewpoint, that's a humongous enabler. Indeed, in this era,
your dialup connection is not far removed from Marconi's time wrt
practicality. Just saying...

I know how bad my current connection is, I've been trying years to get
something done about it. I'm the last house on a dead end rural road
and the phone lines are so old they actually go through trees in a
couple places ( the wood has grown around the wires, over time.) The
phone repair guy once told me he had never seen worse or more spliced
lines BUT the phone company says they meet the minimum data transfer
required by regulations ( enough for a FAX machine, apparently ) and
there is no way they are going to replace a mile of line to make me
happy.

One thing I want to know is there an official difference between mb
and MB ... are these a million bits and a million bytes and is byte
8 times the data as bit. The people on the phones seem to use
"megabit" and "megabyte" interchangeably but I think that is
wrong .... are most advertised speeds in bits or bytes?

TIA,again