The BBC News website is pretty good at explaining things, like that there are a lot of good reasons to have broadband. “As broadband speeds get faster, BBC News looks at what speeds are required to run different online applications.” They posted a graph on their site, (sourced from thinkbroadband.com) that gives a good idea of what you can and can’t do, if you don’t have a high enough internet connection speed.
It’s basically about the amount of data you can upload or download and how quickly you can do it. For example, you can upload digital photos to be printed if you have less than a speed of 1Mbps, but it’ll take about an hour. But if you have a small increase in connection speed to about 1.5Mbps, it’ll take only 10 minutes to do the same thing.
Think broadband.com puts it in terms of usage:
“The amount of data you transfer depends on what you do. Downloading lots of music or viewing a lot of video content will increase your usage. Video is probably one of the main causes of high usage on the Internet. This includes watching movie trailers (or even entire movies), home movies posted on websites like YouTube, or viewing TV over the Internet. Peer-to-peer (P2P) programs such as eDonkey, Kazaa, and BitTorrent can also be high bandwidth utilisers.” (British spelling.)
With 1 mbps or less you can download and listen to online radio, receive video and audio from Skype, watch videos on YouTube, play World of Warcraft, use an iPlayer or pay bills online.
You’ll need more to download an entire album in mp3 format, watch YouTube in high quality, or play Second Life. The higher the quality of video or graphics, the greater your need for speed.