As the Internet grows in popularity,choosing the right connection for accessing it is becoming a very important decision at many nonprofits. While modems still provide many smaller nonprofits with their crawling connection, DSL, cable, ISDN, and T1 are introducing many organizations to the joys of high-speed access.
When you read an ad that says: “Our Connection Provides You With an Amazing and Unbelievable 10 Megs Per Second Download Speed,” you should be amazed, but maybe not as much as you think. Some time back, a quick marketing person decided that Internet connection speed would be better described in bits, not the bytes usually used to describe disk size and RAM space. So that “unbelievable” 10 MegaBITS per second is actually about 1.25 megaBYTES per second. This article, not to confuse things further, will continue to discuss Internet speed in bits per second. So, don’t jump out of your skin the next time you read about another “unbelievable” download speed. Simply divide by 8.
