Broadband speeds have risen since the telcos and ISPs gave us DSL and cable modem. Now, it’s not uncommon to see speeds going higher than 1 Megabit per second. While “broadband” is generally defined as speeds exceeding just 100 Kilobits per second, the norm would be 512 Kbps up to one Mbps in the Americas and UK. In Japan and South Korea, you can even get speeds up to 10 or even 20 Megabits per second! Amazing, isn’t it?

So does this mean you can actually get to use your WiFi gear’s rated network speed of 54 Mbps (for WiFi G)? Well, not really. Say you’re signing up for access to a public WiFi network, you also have to consider network latency, which is the time it takes for the network to respond to requests. So your public WiFi network may not necessarily be able to give you speeds exceeding even 1 Mbps. Sometimes, the network speed is fast (running in the Megabits per second), but given the number of hops and relays your data has to go through, then you’ll have to contend with a few minutes’ wait!

I know of several networks claiming to be fast—yes, the raw speed of the connection is fast, but the network latency is so bad you have to wait a couple of minutes for the website you’re viewing to finish loading! Now that’s not fast service, after all.

We still stick to our advice: check/test the service first before signing up!