Telecommunications Bandwidth
The Federal Communications Commission defines "broadband" technologies as any that support more than 200,000 bits per second.
Cable modems and DSL lines are typically "asymmetric," meaning their upload and download speeds are different; the upload speeds for sending data are slower than the download speeds for receiving data.
T1 lines, Ethernet, T3 and fiber lines are typically symmetric, meaning the download and upload speeds are the same.
The major trunk lines for the Internet backbone are today running at speeds of between 2.4 billion and 10 billion bits per second, or gigabits per second. Internet 2, a federally-funded research program investigating the next-generation of Internet applications, runs on the Abilene network at 2.4 gigabits per second.
Experimental networks in laboratories have been demonstrated to run at terabit speeds, or trillions of bits per second.
