There's no doubt that a high speed Internet connection can do a lot of good things for you and your family. After all, the more quickly and easily you can access information and entertainment, the better. Right? Therefore the faster the Internet connection that you can get, the better off you are.

Unfortunately, when it comes to high speed Internet, you have a number of options. This is unfortunate because making a choice among all of these different options can be torturous and the typical consumer is frankly ill equipped to discern the difference among all of these options. This is all the more true when marketing propaganda takes the place of information.

The good news about all of this is the the knowledge that you need in order to determine which kind of high speed Internet connection is right for you isn't all the complex. Basically, you need to know about bandwidth and latency. Bandwidth is the amount of data that can be delivered in a given amount of time. Specifically how much data can be delivered in a second. The more bandwidth you have, the better. Latency is the time that it takes for you request for data to travel over the Internet and a replay to travel back. The less lower the latency an Internet connection is, the better it is. High bandwidth makes downloading enormous amounts of data easier, and low latency minimizes the time that you spend waiting for the information that you requested. Low latency is especially useful for using Internet tools and applications that are designed for real time interactions. For example, anything that involves voice chatting or gaming works a lot more effectively with a low latency Internet connection.

When it comes to the technology that provides the best combination of low latency and large bandwidth, it's pretty clear that broad band digital cable is the best choice. Basically, broad band digital cable delivers the most bandwidth of any of the mainstream forms of high speed Internet service for the home and as low a latency as you can find. It's also a really good value, with a monthly price that's comparable to the closest competing technology- which is DSL- and it's much cheaper than satellite Internet.

Of course, any assessment of the different high speed Internet products out there would be incomplete without looking at the competition. Therefore, it's a good idea to get an idea of what DSL and satellite Internet are capable of. This also provides insight into some of the details of broad band digital cable high speed Internet technology. DSL is probably the next best service. It has low latency and it's widely available. However DSL also suffers from low bandwidth. While broad band digital cable delivers eight megabytes per second or more of data transfer capacity, DSL delivers about three at most and often a lot less than that! The problem with DSL is that it's delivered over phone lines which just can't carry as much data all at once as a cable can.

In many ways satellite Internet is even worse. It delivers about the same amount of bandwidth as DSL, but has a much greater latency. The fact that the satellites are so far above the surface of the Earth means that satellite Internet will always have a lot of latency simply because of how slow the speed of light is. It's also the most expensive form of high speed Internet service available in the private home.

Hopefully this article puts the issues of choosing a high speed Internet connection into a context that makes choosing an Internet service provider a lot easier.