Enjoying Better Technology

What Defines A Good Internet And Phone Plan?

26 September 2017

Riley Garrett

Communication has changed a lot in just a few decades, and continues explosive growth within the last couple of years alone. Internet and mobile technology has already entered, exited, and revisited their hype and scary phases, moving between great convenience and dependency to disgust and reconnecting with the offline world. If you're a person of balance who wants to use internet and phones sensibly, you need a sensible plan. Here are a few details outlining what matters when picking a service plan that fits your specific needs.

Why Does Internet Speed Matter?

With so many advertisements about fast internet speeds and being faster than the compensation, does anyone ever stop and ask why faster speeds matter? "Speed" tugs at both primal and technical aspects of human life, since "speed" is often synonymous with "better", and many people know what it feels like to be on a slow internet connection when they're used to everything loading quickly.

In purely technical terms, speed refers to how fast information is sent from source to destination. Speed actually refers to both the speed of the data and the capacity of the data. The end result is faster information on your computer, but it happens because the internet connection or "pipe" is bigger and able to push more data at the same time--along with faster transfer speeds regardless of the pipe size.

Stability And Consistency Matter The Most

Before racing for the biggest, faster internet pipe, you need to know whether that pipe is stable. What many people don't understand is that many internet speed issues are actually because of interruptions in the network path, either at your Internet Service Provider (ISP), the internet at large, the specific website or web resources you're trying to access, or your home network.

If there is a piece of equipment causing multiple errors, the information needs to be resent. This takes time, which adds to the average time needed for you to get the final result. What you view on your computer screen is actually a puzzle that is quickly put together from many pieces called packets, and when parts of that puzzle are slow, it holds up the big picture being delivered. With enough errors, you may go back to the days of pictures loading slowly, line by line.

Consistency issues are mostly the ISP's problem, but you need to know that they exist and you need to know how to get your side fixed. If your computer has a virus, it could be affecting internet or general computer performance. If someone else in your home is doing heavy downloading or watching videos on services such as Netflix or Youtube, you need to either get a bigger internet plan or configure some sort of throttling to make sure the big data users in the home aren't ruining everyone else's internet use.

Problems on the internet at large are trickier. No one company owns all connections on the internet, so if there's a petty hacker war using huge amounts of abusive data to attack someone else while slowing down an entire superhighway of information, or a massive and vital internet cable severed (this happens more often at the local level), you'll have to wait for a fix from parties bigger than your ISP.

Contact an internet, telephone, and TV provider, like Dalton Utilities, to discuss internet speed packages that fit your needs, and consider bundling the other services to enhance your entertainment and communications.

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