By Leslie Cauley, USA TODAY
Speed thrills on the Internet, but how fast is fast enough, really?
Dial-up Internet access is the cheapest. At about $10 a month, it's less than half the typical $20 cost of entry-level DSL broadband and much less than $35 to $60 for faster DSL and cable broadband.
But cable TV and phone companies, which are spending billions to turn their networks into state-of-the-art Internet playgrounds for consumers, continue to push their fastest — and most expensive — broadband. They'll turn up the juice even more as time goes by. Few offer home users ultra-fast broadband speeds, but some are heading that way. Verizon, the New York-based communications giant, is running fiber-optic lines to homes with the goal of offering mind-bending browsing speeds of 100 megabits per second or more.
Is dial-up really dead, then, when it comes to Web browsing? Do you really need to pay more for a faster broadband service?
Bottom line: How fast is fast enough?
To answer such questions, USA TODAY asked the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., to conduct a series of performance tests on six Internet access speeds: 56 kilobits-per-second (dial-up) and 625 kbps, 1.5 megabits-per-second, 3 mbps, 6 mbps and 24 mbps. They represent a sampling of current and future speeds from phone (DSL), cable and cellular data services.
The goal: to ascertain the bare minimum speed consumers need for popular Internet activities.
What the researchers found
Photos: Downloading a typical 4.3-megabyte photo (standard resolution ) using a 56-kilobit connection took about 640 seconds, or more than 10 minutes.
"That's the outer limits of most people's patience," says Patrick White, director of the wireless network security center at Stevens, who oversaw the tests.
Using a 625-kilobit connection — the average for many wireless networks and about 100 kilobits less than the cheapest DSL connection — the same photo took around 58 seconds. At 1.5 megabits, the download took 24 seconds; at 3 megabits, 12 seconds; 6 megabits, 6 seconds; and with a 24-megabit connection: 1.5 seconds.
Music: A 56-kbps download of Mariah Carey's four-minute, 20-second song Always Be My Baby, a 4.2-megabyte file, took about 10 minutes. "That would drive most kids nuts," White says.
At 625 kilobits, it took about a minute; at 1.5 megabits, 23 seconds; 3 megabits, 11 seconds; 6 megabits, 5.6 seconds. A 24-mbps connection took 1.4 seconds.
Web browsing: White and his team downloaded the home page of The New York Times site, a 98-kilobyte file on test day.
With dial-up, it took about 14 seconds. "Reasonable," White says. At 625 kilobits, it took 1.3 seconds, and all other speeds took "fractions of a second," he says.
Podcast download into a video iPod: Researchers downloaded the NBC Nightly News, a 114-megabyte file on test day.
Using dial-up, the download took an excruciating 280 minutes — nearly five hours.
"That's untenable," White says.
At 625 kilobits, the time was a still-painful 26 minutes. A 1.5-megabit connection cut it to about 10 minutes; 3 megabits to five minutes; 6 megabits to 160 seconds; and 24 mbps to 40 seconds.
Movie download: Researchers downloaded Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator 2 as the test. With a running time of two hours and 32 minutes, the sci-fi epic gobbled up a hefty 1.6 gigabytes.
Downloading via dial-up took a staggering 67 hours. At 1.5 megabits, it took 2½ hours, nearly as long as the film. The wait was still onerous at 3 megabits: 4,500 seconds, or 75 minutes.
"Nobody's going to do that," White says.
The wait at 6 megabits was significantly better: 2,290 seconds, or about 38 minutes.
A 24-megabit connection took just 570 seconds, or about 9.5 minutes.
Audio streaming: Researchers used streaming audio from WNYC, a public radio station in New York City, as the test. The speed of the audio stream (the feed from the station): around 32 kilobits.
That audio stream consumed about 58% of the dial-up connection's bandwidth, making the quality "just awful," White says. At 625 kilobits, just 5% of capacity was used, "so the sound was wonderful."
At faster speeds, the streaming ate up a lower percentage of capacity, "but the sound quality was constant," researcher Jason Moiron says.
The transmission quality of streaming media is a function of bandwidth, Moiron says: The more you have, the better it is — up to a point. For audio, he notes, the cutoff beyond which it gets no better is about 625 kilobits.
•Video streaming: Researchers used cable news network CNN. It streams online at about 400 kilobits per second, typical for Internet-based video. (Broadcast TV, by contrast, streams at about 1 to 6 mbps.)
Dial-up was essentially useless.
"It was too slow to handle the bit rate," White says. "It just doesn't have the bandwidth." Moiron says the 625-kilobit connection also fell flat: "Theoretically, you should be able to handle (video streaming) at 625k, but in reality, it didn't work."
The faster speeds did not disappoint, however. When CNN was streamed over a 1.5-megabit, 3-megabit, 6-megabit and 24-megabit connections, the video feed "looked just fine," White says. "The quality was really good."
Bottom line for consumers
Consumers considering a high-speed broadband subscription should think hard about what they're actually going to use it for, White says. While faster speeds might be enticing, there's no need to pay the higher prices those services command if you don't really need the extra juice.
How much juice do you need?
"Depends on what you're going to use it for," White says.
For simple Web browsing with no audio or video downloading, that can be 56-kilobit dial-up.
"For limited applications, it's fine," he says.
For more robust applications — such as music or video downloading — you'll want to spring for a faster connection.
"Once you get over to the other side and start doing TV downloads, podcasts, audio streaming" and the like, he says, "you're looking at 625 (kilobits) as a minimum. Otherwise, it's kind of painful."