BroadBand :)

What is Broadband?
The term broadband refers to a telecommunications signal of greater bandwidth, in some sense, than another standard or usual signal (and the broader the band, the greater the capacity for traffic). Different criteria for "broad" have been applied in different contexts and at different times. Its origin is in radio systems engineering, but became popularized after MediaOne adopted it as part of a marketing campaign in 1996 to sell their high speed data access. The slogan was "This is Broadband. This is the Way". The term has never been formally defined, even though it is used widely and has been the subject of many policy debates, and the FCC "National Broadband Plan".
What units are used to measure bandwidth?

Bandwidth is measured in Hertz . Above is an example of Lights flash at frequency f = 0.5 Hz (Hz = hertz), 1.0 Hz and 2.0 Hz, where x Hz means x flashes per second. T is the period and T = y s (s = second) means that y is the number of seconds per flash. T and f are each other's reciprocal: f = 1/T and T = 1/f.
How much faster is broadband than dial up?
Dial Up means that you use an actual phone circuit to get data connectivity. The most you can get is around 56KbpsBroadband is a ‘broad bandwidth’ connection. It allows a large amount of data to travel through a medium at the same time. There are many opinions about what a large amount of data entails. Everything is relative though.

The term "broadband" refers to the high-speed internet connection that most of us now have access to. The basic (some might even call it "old-fashioned" nowadays) internet connection used to be via a (dial-up) telephone line in your home or your office.
On dial-up, when you used the computer's internet connection you had to use the same line as your telephone line. Because of the technology available in the early days, a phone conversation and internet data couldn't share the same line. So you could talk on the telephone or surf the internet, but you couldn't do both at the same time. This made using the internet a difficult experience and pretty inconvenient, especially for home users.
However, with a broadband connection you either have a high-speed line dedicated to the internet (as in a cable connection), or a high-speed telephone line which is able to accommodate both voice and data simultaneously (as in the case of DSL). DSL connections require a filter to keep noise from the voice side from impeding the transfer of data.
A lot of people who still have a dial-up connection are now switching to broadband as soon as it becomes available in their locality. They have experienced the huge difference in speed and dial-up now seems far too slow. When you've been on a broadband connection at your place work and then come home to dial-up, it can be quite disappointing.The market for broadband in the UK is huge, with many broadband providers competing for your business. Each type of broadband connection has its pros and cons. You'll need to consider which service offers the speed you need at a price you can easily afford.Make sure that you take advantage of the many special offers about. Because of the fierce competition between broadband providers, many of them offer various savings on monthly fees and supply routers for free, which can make your entry into broadband pretty inexpensive.

What are the speeds that broadband operates at compared to dial up?

Dialup may achieve speeds of up to 56 Kbps, while broadband routinely delivers at least 5 million bytes per second (or 5Mbps), which is much faster than the FCC's requirement for broadband.

 What are some of the advantages of using a broadband connection to download something like a video compared to dial up?

 Advantages of using Broadband is the speed,reliablity,a fixed rate and how convenient they are. But for dial UpAdvantages of Dial Up Internet Access

Low Cost: Dial up method has always been and will remain the cheapest method of connecting to the Internet. All kinds of usages are charged according to the telephone call tariff only. No extra money is charged just because it is being used in data transfer, most of the times. Sometimes, the prizes go up because of the individual requirements of speed and performance.

Safety: A dial up connection is much safer than any other technology because of the rotation of the IP addresses, assigned to a user. IP address is a set of numbers assigned to you, that you use to connect to the Internet. So, wherever you go you leave a trail behind. Using a dial up connection, every time a person logs in, he does so using a new IP address. This makes hacking an account impossible and saves the user a lot of headache. IP address theft has some serious consequences, like someone can login using your IP address and do 'wrong things' that may actually point back at you.

Availability: This is probably the best feature of dial up internet access. It provides the user with the convenience of using his account wherever the service is available. That means, if you are going on a vacation and the service provider is available at that location, you can very much log in to your account and access the internet. This is mostly not the case with the broadband connection. And hence the dial up gets an upper edge when it comes to 'being there', always.

Disadvantages of Dial Up Internet Access

Speed: Speed is one of the biggest disadvantages of a dial up connection. The maximum speed a dial up connection can achieve is 56,000 bytes per second, which is way too less compared to all the other technologies available, these days. The page loading speed is so slow that, many times you may want to go and finish other works in between. The slow speed of the dial up can be easily and very conveniently blamed on the technology that it uses. The internet surfing process on a dial up connection goes through various levels of conversions, modulations and also handshakes (yes, the machines hand shake and agree to a few things, before they start working). We are not going in details of the working of this technology here. For now, it's enough to know that all these processes, that actually happen in a few minutes are really tedious. One should really go through the technology concepts at least once. It's guaranteed that you will stop complaining about the speed of your connection and will start admiring it. A computer actually achieves so much in just a few minutes. But yes, there are many technologies that are doing better, and hence the less popularity of the dial up connection.

Requires Phone Line: A dial up connection requires a permanent phone line, that can be dialed to connect to the Internet. So you cannot always carry your internet along with you, like with some other technologies. Yes, you can surf it from some other place but only when there is an existing phone line of the same service provider, at that place.

Route Busy: Everyone of us born in the 80s and the 90s very well know, what it means. Newer generations might not be familiar with it because of the absence of land lines in most places, these days. By route busy, the technology means that the single line available, is being used for some kind of data transfer and hence anything else cannot be done right now. So if the user is using the line for internet purpose, the line will sound busy for the other people, who may be trying to dial in. Hence, there may be times, that you are connecting to the world and feeling liberated and at the same time, your parents (out for a trip) are going mad trying to call you up at home.

Create an image in paint that illustrates how a high bandwidth connection can move more data compared to a dial up connection at a given time.

Think of your connection to the internet as a tunnel that links your computer to the internet. A regular phone line can allow only a small amount of data to pass through at a time. In comparison, a broadband is a wider (or broader) tunnel, allowing a greater amount of information to pass through your connection at one time. The width of this tunnel is called "bandwidth." The more bandwidth you have, the faster you can move data.

A] How many people subscribed to the internet in 2007? How many of these were for business use? How many for home use?

Well 25% of people got dial up,50% got DSL, 10% got cable and 5% got wireless.  About a 100 subscribed for business and around about 700 for home use.

B] Look at the access technologies heading. How many more people are using broadband since 2005? Remember that you have to add 000 to the numbers.

Couldnt find any access technologies
Testing Speed of Internet
The speed of the 'Ping' is 58ms
Download speed : .56mbps
Upload Speed : .66mbps