When there are a lot of different types of Internet services available, choosing the best one for you can sometimes be confusing. This is especially true if you aren't very good with technical things. It's actually fairly easy though to get a hold on all of the differences among the various Internet access technologies that you can get in your home just by learning a few different facts.

The first thing that it helps to understand is how download speeds are measured. For the purposes of home Internet connections, download speeds are measured in the amount of data that can be downloaded in a second. For example, the maximum speed of a dial up modem is 56 kilobytes per second and a kilobyte is one thousand characters, so a dial up Internet connection can let you download the equivalent of a document with 56,000 letters every second. While this may sound pretty fast, the fact that there are a lot of pictures littering the Internet these days- and digital pictures are literally worth a thousand words- a dial up Internet connection turns out to be pretty slow. The faster Internet download technologies have speeds measured in megabytes and a megabyte is one thousand kilobytes and 1.4 megabytes is the amount of data that will fit on one 3.5 inch floppy disk.

Now that you have an idea of what download speeds mean, you can start to understand the relative differences among the different Internet access technologies. DSL is the slowest type of home Internet connection technology that's taken seriously these days. DSL is provided through phone companies and takes advantage of existing phone lines to provide an always on Internet connection that won't interfere with the normal use of the phone line. DSL download speeds vary between 268 kilobytes per second and 2 megabytes per second.

The fastest type of residential Internet access technology is called broad band digital cable, and it's available through digital cable TV companies like Comcast. Comcast high speed Internet service can provide consistent download speeds as high as 8 megabytes per second with 16 megabytes per second available in some areas for brief periods of time to handle especially large downloads. Comcast's high speed Internet service comes with free antivirus software- as well as updates for it- and a free wireless router so that all of your computers can access the Internet from anywhere in your home. It also provides access to a variety of different online features.

Yet another choice for accessing the Internet can be found through satellite technology. Satellite Internet service is available almost anywhere and can provide download speeds as high as 3 megabytes per second, but it has more than its share of disadvantages. For one thing it requires a massive investment in special equipment, and after that, its monthly subscription is about twice that of Comcast's broad band cable Internet access and most DSL services. Even setting aside the costs, the satellites that this technology uses are so far away that users experience a lag time that makes it pretty much useless for online multiplayer computer games and other applications that are dependent on precise timing.

Among all of these different technologies, you'll probably find that broad band cable high speed Internet from a company like Comcast is will provide the most speed, the best value, and the greatest degree of versatility.