Simply put, bandwidth is the term that describes the highest speed an Internet connection is capable of transmitting. Just as the size of the tap you have is a determining factor in your water pressure capacity, so bandwidth determines your Internet speed capacity.

Internet speed is measured by identifying how many bits or bytes (the term for units of information) are transferred in one second.

Because these units are so small, metric-based prefixes are used to describe them as follows:

• Kilo for 1,000 kilobits or kilobytes per second (KBps or Kbps)

• Mega for 1 million megabits or megabytes per second (MBps or Mbps)

• Giga for 1 billion gigabits or gigabytes per second (Gbps or GBps)

Most Internet upload speeds are expressed in Mbps, while the slower uploads are measured in Kbps. 

Did you know that your satellite connection is affected by the frequency you get it on? The Ka-band is the very latest in satellite technology. The reason for this lies in frequency. Older technologies had frequencies in the 12 to 18 GHz range, while Ka-band uses frequencies in the 26.5 to 40 GHz range.

This higher frequency means that it is possible to get more bandwidth, which means a higher data transfer rate and, therefore, higher performance and speed.

Think of it like a radio frequency. An older AM radio typically has a low frequency of around 1MHz, whereas a more modern FM radio has a frequency of approximately 1GHz. The FM radio would transmit a crisper sound because of its higher frequency.

That is why we use it to deliver affordable, dependable, high-performance satellite solutions to our customers!

Latency is the time it takes for a signal to make a round-trip journey from your smart device and back. There is a half-second delay with satellite Internet service caused by the distance that data needs to travel up to the satellite and back again. Therefore, time-sensitive applications that require fractions-of-a-second user inputs (such as multi-player “twitch” games or real-time equities trading) are not supported by ZemCom Internet Satellite Solutions.

A ping is not a reliable latency measurement. The reason for this is that a Satellite is based in a geostationary orbit approximately 36,000 km above the equator. Due to the distance it has to cover, it will normally take approximately 600ms.

Added to this, a ping is classified as a low priority command by networks. This means that all other applications will be processed before the ping command.

As there is no acceleration applied to the ping command, this can sometimes cause increased ping times or even a ‘time out’ – making it an undependable speed test.

Two numbers that you will always encounter when subscribing to an Internet solution are the upload speed and download speed of the service:
Download speed is the speed at which your computer or smart device ‘gets’ information from the Internet. In other words, when you try and open your email, your download speed would determine how long it takes to load your emails and applications.

Upload speed is the speed at which information travels from your internet-connected device to the Internet. So if you send an email, your upload speed would determine how long it takes for your email to arrive in the mailbox of the intended recipient.

You will notice that download speeds are much higher than upload speeds.
The reason for this is that Internet users download much more information than what they upload.

So watching movies, getting the latest best-seller from Amazon for your Kindle or scrolling though Facebook doesn’t require much upload speed.
Upload speed counts when you rely heavily on the Internet to do interactive activities like video chatting on Skype or sending large files through applications like Wetransfer.