Broadband speed can be compared to a broad highway through which traffic moves smoothly at great speed, without any road blocks, breaks, delays or other hassles. You reach your destination straightaway without loss of time and conduct your business expeditiously. Internet broadband is similar to the breadth and smoothness of a well-designed highway, in that it enables the transfer of data instantly with a click of the mouse.

The move from dialup to broadband can also be understood by comparing it to the telephone system itself. In the old telephone system, a caller had to try connecting again and again and then reconnect if the call did not go through due to disturbance on the line, or if the line was snapped altogether. The old-timers can very well recall the frustration in such situations - especially when some important communication was to being attempted.

It takes pretty long time to upload and download a file using a dialup modem with a speed of 28Kb/per sec, but with a broadband connection the same file can be transferred in a matter of seconds. This has become possible because the bandwidth allows for a speed in the range of 256 Kb/second to 10Mb/second. There is obviously a great gap between 28Kb/sec and 10Mb/sec. The magnitude of the difference in transmission speed can be easily understood if you know that one kilobit is equal to one thousand bits and one megabit is equal to one million bits, where a bit is the smallest unit of information.

There is one more simple technical point to be said in context of the broadband speed. There is an asymmetry between the speed at which a file is uploaded from your computer to the Internet and the speed at which it is downloaded from the Internet to your computer. It takes a longer time to upload a file and a much shorter time to download it. It is much like climbing upstairs and coming downstairs. Usually an average Internet user downloads more data than he uploads. Symmetric connections, in which upload and download speeds are the same, are available. However, symmetric connections are usually more expensive than asymmetric connections.