Dial Up
Local connection traffic moves at slow speed Dial up started at 200 kbps and now is called 56k but in truth by law cannot exceed 53k.
BROADBAND
FCC defines Broadband as over 200kbps cable will allow speeds up to and maybe a little over 3.0megabits per second IDSN runs about 128k
Dsl will allow speeds up to 9mbps It is a common practice for providers to give out max speeds as normal speed. A good time to test actual speed is during the week between Christmas and New Years. see bottom of tools page
BACKBONE
The internet backbone is the interconnected High speed high bandwith fiber optic cables that crisscross the united statees and the earth with a redundancy that
allows communication between every location at rates of speed and bandwidth.
The backbone is self healing. (should one connection go down it is bypassed on a differnt route in microseconds)
Common Terms
T1 = 1.5Mbps to 2Mbps
T3 = 45Mbps
OC3 = 155Mbps
OC12 = 620Mbps
OC48 = 2500Mbps or 2.5Gbps
OC192=10000Mbps or 10Gbps
For more detail see Wikipedia
Internet Backbone Maps
