euge.tv

If you like to watch online video you’ll understand the importance of bandwidth (particularly if you’ve ever tried to view video over a dial-up connection!)

However, one thing that most people don’t realise is that if you’re a video content creator, then, it’s not just how fast you can download your video that counts, but also upload.

Most people when shopping around for the fastest Internet connection only look at the download speed (8Mbit, 24Mbit, etc).

But they forget to the look at the number after the slash.

Ie. 2Mbit/128kbps

That number (the 128kbps) tells you how fast the upload speed is.

So… why should you care? Here’s why:

If you’re creating any video content for the web, and you need to actually upload it to a website, then you’ll care… bigtime!

Got a 100MB 45min video to upload. You’ll start to care… pretty darn quickly.

The common wisdom with Internet connections is basically that Cable Internet is generally the fastest, whether you are looking at standard cable (usually 10Mbps) or Cable2 (usually around 18Mbps).

But, given that cable is a shared medium, the uploads are often crippled.

For example, I’ve got cable broadband at home, and until recently I could only upload at 128Kbps (or 16 KBytes / sec).

So, you might be asking?

Well, last night I had to upload a 4.5 GB file to lulu.com

And at 16KBytes / sec it would take almost 2 days to upload the file. Whereas at 32Kbytes it would take about a day.

Big difference!!!

So in this respect, ADSL wins out.

So for online video content producers, perhaps ADSL2 is the way to go. Or get the best of both worlds, one of each :-)