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Anyone who has used dial up Internet and high speed Internet can tell you that there are a huge number of advantages to having high speed Internet in your own home. But it's really not that easy to sort out what constitutes high speed Internet service. That's largely because many companies will make the case for anything that's faster than dial up being high speed Internet, but with the download speeds of these services ranging from 268 kilobytes per second to more than 8 megabytes per second, it's debatable whether or not the slower ones truly qualify as high speed Internet access. At the upper end of the technologies available for residential Internet customers, there's broad band cable high speed Internet access. Broad band cable technology is based on the same technology that delivers digital cable TV and is available through digital cable TV providers like Comcast. Comcast offers this service with download speeds of up to 8 megabytes per second, with the ability to provide data at speeds as high as 16 megabytes per second for periods of especially high demand in some areas.

The speed offered by Comcast's service makes it a lot faster than many other services that still claim to take advantage of high speed technologies, and that speed can make a big difference when it comes to what you can do on the Internet. For instance, it makes downloading larger files like those containing full length movies and major software packages actually feasible. It can also allow an entire family to share the same Internet connection all at once and using multiple computers over a wireless network. (In fact, Comcast Internet provides a wireless router along with it's service in order to make this possible.) In addition to those options, broad band cable high speed Internet service can make it possible to enjoy online gaming and VoIP applications because it has plenty of speed and doesn't have the built in lag time of some other types of supposed high speed Internet access technologies.

The other types of technology that other companies market as high speed Internet connections don't measure up to Comcast Cable high speed Internet technology in a variety of ways. For example, DSL is the slowest type of technology that's normally passed off as high speed Internet access. While it can provide download speeds as high as two megabytes per second- which might be enough to satisfy someone who doesn't need to share that bandwidth with an entire family across a home network and doesn't need to download huge files- it's only a quarter of the speed offered by Comcast's service. Most DSL connections fall way short of two megabytes per second though. For example, some have less than one megabyte per second and some are even as slow as 268 kilobytes per second- which is close enough to dial up to not really be worth the extra price.

With download speeds of up to three megabytes per second, satellite Internet service isn't much better. The real disadvantage of it is that it's a lot more expensive than Comcast's broad band cable service, plus it has a built in lag time because of the distance that the signals have to travel to the satellites in orbit and then back down to the Earth's surface. That lag time makes satellite Internet totally unsuitable for things like online gaming and VoIP applications.

For the best speed and value, broad band high speed Internet service from a company like Comcast is the option to look for.